Fixed this issue while troubleshooting with MrX. Smithy had reverted the concrete impact sounds, but the sound.cache didn't get that apparently so... delete your sound.cache for the fix. Navigate to Empires/empires/sound and delete the file at the very bottom called sound.cache. Should fix it. MrX said it did.
I hope you are ready for another 3 months of being told you ruined Empires, because most players won't do that.
I was in favor of making the game delete the file on launch, but it's hacky. snd_restart sometimes fixes these issues
Would it be possible to just add empty sound.cache to the sounds on each empires update? (overwrite) Just tested that the game will delete that file if its empty on start and create a new one on map load. (or you can enter any value into it, if you dont want empty file, seems to work as well) So just make each update on steam overwrite it with an empty one? (if you dont wanna use some pre generated one) If you can.
The drawback of that approach is that the first time startup takes a very long time. I'm working on changing our build setup to automatically generate soundcaches, it should be fixed in 2.14.1 or 2.15.1.
Wait hold on, are you talking about the first time startup of... Empires? Because if you are, no it really doesn't take a long time. It made me think of JustGoFly saying maps take a long time to load. When it takes under 2 seconds with an SSD.
I don't think the limit on loading maps is based on hard drive speed, most maps aren't that big after all. I think it's more processor speed and ram, because when I was playing empires for a while with just a hard disk I still loaded map first before anyone else usually. Loaded maps faster then my laptop which only has ssds.
