You will find forum posts saying: "Just delete the Ottoman faction from the startpos.esf" or "Turn diplomacy off." Do not do these. They will corrupt your campaign or crash the game. The Ottoman Empire is hard-coded into the victory conditions. Removing them makes the game CTD on turn 10.
: Capturing Istanbul permanently fixes the issue by removing the AI's need to shuffle troops through that specific bottleneck. You can keep it or gift it to another faction like the Crimean Khanate to maintain a buffer. empire total war darthmod ottoman turn lag fix best
: Move a ship (even a single sloop) to the water crossing between Istanbul and Ankara (Anatolia). You will find forum posts saying: "Just delete
Similarly, "upgrading your CPU" is not a solution. A modern i9 or Ryzen 9 will still suffer because the game’s engine only uses . You cannot brute-force bad code. You must outsmart it with the fixes above. Removing them makes the game CTD on turn 10