Alright well I got Empire earth 2 for christmas and Its a good game but no matter what setting I choose it lags me to death.
As you can see I'm over the requirements and recommended settings, So any of you smart guys got an idea of why the game jumps all over the place?

I can hardly help when you don't give any details about your system or what is running in the background. Also knowing if you are forcing AA and AF through the video drivers would be nice to know, since that is overall a bad idea for newer games.

well at least tell us what your running it at, like resolution, if you have AA on, etc.

AA-Let the application decide
Adaptive AA- Quality
Anisotropic filtering- 8X, High quality AF
Mipimap- High quality

And I also end all programs not needed during gameplay

Looks good judging by your X1600. But you still haven't told us your overall system specs...

Processor -AMD Athlon(tm) 64 1800MHz
Display Card -ATI RADEON X1600
Memory -768MB
Operating System -Microsoft Windows XP
Free Disk Space -29.74GB
Display Card Memory -512MB
Display Driver Version -6.14.10.6599
DirectX Version -9.0c
Optical Drive -N/A
Sound Card -Realtek AC97 Audio

Thats all the info I could get off of windows game advisor

This is a wild guess, but try lower hardware acceleration from the dxdiag tool and if you can, turn off any advanced audio that may be enabled in-game. Also drop max sounds per channel if the game allows it.

This may make me sound stupid but what does Hardware acceleration mean?
I get the idea of accelerating hardware but whats that have to do with gameplay?

When you don't have an audio card, the game gives processor the honor of processing audio data. That of course is a huge bottleneck if a game uses high quality audio. And add video, code and mathematical processing onto that 1.8 Ghz single core CPU you have...

Lowering hardware acceleration will hardly give visible results, but you should definitely check out the other tips.

I'm not really sure what HW accel. does really, it has been years since I had onboard audio.

Ok theres no way to drop max channels or turn off advanced audio but I am lowering hardware sound acceleration to standard.

Let's hope it makes a positive framerate change. If not then I can only suggest buying more memory, today's standard is over 2x the amount you have. Also your processor could be better, is it A64 3700+ by any chance?

maybe its just cause he doesn't have even RAM? Would that even affect anything?

What do you mean?

well i mean't most ram goes 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096 etc his is in the middle.

768 MB is the total, he probably has 1x256 MB and 1x512 MB sticks, or 3x256 MB, there are few combos possible.
But that shouldn't cause any problems at all, his low amount of memory is what might be a bottleneck in this case though.

I remember when I only had 256, but now I have a 1 gig memory stick in ther also, I have a total of 1024+256 MB memory, or 1280 MB in memory. Yay, now my compy's better than my bro's XPS! Well, he still has a better graphics card....

I'd bet it would be a memory bottleneck also.

I played EE2 with 512 ram and it ran good, not great but good enough for me

Well, I can't really figure out any certain reason what is causing this. Updating video/audio/motherboard drivers, making sure the PCIx bus is set to max bandwidth; all these and a lot more tips could be tried. But only a reformat would most likely get rid of the problem.

yeah get the latest video driver

I have the latest catalyst drivers

This makes me wonder, if you can, look for a forum where ATi drivers are discussed. Maybe the driver might be a bad one. nVidia are releasing very bad drivers these days, I'm using 84.21 which are dated back in April I think, and they work better than the new 93.71.

what are the requirements for EE2?

Minimum Specification
Microsoft® Windows® 98/Me/2000/XP operating system
NVIDIA® GeForce™ 3 or equivalent DirectX® 9.0c-compliant 64 MB 3D video card with hardware T&L and pixel shader support
1.5 GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 processor or equivalent
256 MB RAM
1.5 GB of uncompressed hard disk space for game files
DirectX® 9.0c (included)
DirectX®-compatible sound card and speakers or headphones
4X CD-ROM drive
Microsoft® compatible mouse and keyboard
Minimum 56K dial-up modem for online play

Recommended Specification
Microsoft® Windows® XP
NVIDIA® GeForce™ 4 or DirectX® 9.0c-compliant 128 MB 3D video card with hardware T&L and pixel shader support
2.2 GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 or faster processor
512 MB RAM or more
1.5 GB of uncompressed hard disk space for game files
DirectX® 9.0c (included)
DirectX®-compatible sound card and speakers or headphones
24X or faster CD-ROM drive
Microsoft® compatible mouse and keyboard
Broadband/LAN, DSL or faster Internet connection for online play

The memory seems to be the only hardware-related bottleneck you have, according to that list.

what kind of slow is it.. does it sorta stop every now and then, or is it always slow and sticky?

that the first step to determining which hardware is causing the beef

i have had lotsa crap from nVidia drivers lately..

Stay away from anything in the 9x.xx range, SB, trust me.

we need some goddamn new hardware!! need 4GB's of RAM.. thatd be nice..

Its slow and sticky

In other words; a typical description of framerate problems. I think this is not hardware related, but software. It is very hard fixing those, if not impossible, unless you are ready to do actions such as formatting the Windows hard drive.

formatting?