I remember this occasional issue back with the original Age of Empires 3, but it’s gotten a lot worse since the new Thursday (October 22nd) patch. In fact, when I played the day after the game released (October 16th), it hardly happened. I played that Friday and Saturday, saved in the middle of the campaign mission “Pirates,” and upon loading up this Friday (October 23rd) with the new patch, I immediately noticed the issue. It happens less in a skirmish game. It may need to build up to lots of units and activity, or it may be more of an issue with the campaign or that campaign level. In the campaign level, this can happen every 10 seconds, or once a minute, and seemingly randomly.
In short, it’s not like stutter or FPS drops in other games, as the FPS drops but the slowdown is then “made up” for in much faster movement/activity afterwards, almost like internet lag. While I normally hover around 60+ FPS, it can drop down to 10 FPS during this time.
Changing all visual settings to the lowest, disabling/enabling vsync, trying different Nvidia Control Panel configurations, etc. does not seem to fix this.
Is anyone else experiencing this after the new patch?
Windows 10
Nvidia 1070 GTX
AMD Ryzen 1800X
Samsung 960 EVO SSD
32 GB RAM
1440p Resolution