Outside of your mounting commands, mostly defaults. Just set core=normal and cycles=10000 or you may get sound stutter.

Mods, shouldn't this be moved to the DOSBox forum?

[Moved to DOSBox Games/Apps. Section]

Thanks for the info.
@Mod eL_PuSHeR: Sorry for posting twice in wrong section. Will be sure to check that it's the DOSBox Games/Apps. next time.

Instead of starting a new thread, I'll drag this one up, because I have a similar problem, and I think I know what the OP was getting at. Caesar 2 for Windows won't work on my PC, which is why I'm using the DOS version. Plus the DOS version looks better.

There's actually just one fairly trivial but rather weird and annoying problem - set to 10000 cycles or more, the game more or less works fine, no problems with sound or music, except for speech. Whenever the introduction to each region is spoken, the game comes to a grinding slowdown, the speech stutters like mad, and the mouse jerks around and moves like its running through treacle. The same happens on the oracle screen, which is the only other screen on which the narrator speaks. There's no problem with other sound effects, and the problem can only be remedied by either switching the sound effects off via SETSOUND or setting the CPU cycle count to 3000, which is far too low for the game itself. I've tried different IRQ values, tried it with SB1, SBPRO, SB16 and GUS, with dynamic and normal cores, different CPU types.

It should be noted that this does NOT happen on a real DOS PC, so I suspect the problem is in DOSBox itself, even if I haven't encountered this issue with many other games.

Does this help?

cycles=max limit 10000

Ladies and gentlemen, we have our optimal settings! 😀

Seems to work perfectly HAL, thanks!