Steam updates unusually slow

For some reason, this game specifically updates extremely slowly on Steam. I have no issues with other games, but this game just took 19 minutes to install the latest 264.3MB update. Installing the game initially took forever. It doesn’t seem to be the downloading (which was nearly instant) but the preallocating and installation. Someone else reported the same issue during the beta, so it’s almost certainly the game and not our computers or internet. What’s the deal?

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It’s probably because files are packed into bar files (archives), every update needs extracting all the files from the archive, putting the updated file and then repacking it all back into the bar archives.

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I’ve experienced the same. It is during the allocating phase where it slows down.
I’ve not experienced this with other games.
It took ~10 minutes to allocate drive space to one of the smaller (20MB) updates – and that’s with a ryzen 5 and an nvme ssd…

It took me less time to download and install another 20GB game than to install the 20MB patch for AOE3.

So I did some investigating and found that it was downloading the update to the wrong steam library.

I have the game installed on my C: drive, while it was downloading the update to the library on my E: drive.

After deleting the library on the E drive, the update went smoothly.

That’s odd. I’ve got Steam and all my games on the same drive so it can’t be that for me.

Do you have multiple steam libraries on that drive though? I wouldn’t think so, but it’s worth checking.

Nah it’s all together on its own drive. It’s not the same drive as Windows or my other programs if maybe that’s causing an issue, but it has never happened with any other game.

I’m having this issue too
I never saw something like that before, this is the only game where small updates takes forever