I'm not here to complain, but to look for suggestions on what we can do to help this situation. Right now when I get to the Modern era of a Marathon/ Huge game, the game is so slow and lags so heavily I just want to quit. I can totally handle the turns taking a minute or two, but when the turn timer is done, it is still wicked awful slow... especially selecting buildings or units to build. There's a terrible lag/delay that makes clicking things in the city screen hard.

I know the problem is directly related to the number of units in the world. Things were fine until I built about 150 new units for a huge assault. This brought my total # of units to 403. The remaining 14 civilizations had a combined 1,960 units between them.

I have a dual core processor already overclocked to 3.3 GHz. 2 Gig of RAM, and ATI X1900XTX video card. I've already changed the memory saving line so I can't alt-tab, and am at a loss as to what I can do to help the terribly slow responsiveness in the game. Being "in" the city screen indicates it shouldn't be a video issue and is totally cpu/mem related.

I hope some of you have some ideas! :)

Buy a faster computer.

Buy a faster computer.

My computer is already pretty fast. Are there any other ini or game settings that can be altered?

A faster computer is the only option, mine still goes almost slow towards the end with a 5600+ and 8800gts 640, theres just so much going on that your computer is greatly taxed. I also build embarrasingly large amounts of units, so many that I conquer whole continents, and would probably make even Nasa's supercomputers tremble.

A faster computer is the only option, mine still goes almost slow towards the end with a 5600+ and 8800gts 640, theres just so much going on that your computer is greatly taxed. I also build embarrasingly large amounts of units, so many that I conquer whole continents, and would probably make even Nasa's supercomputers tremble.

Darn :( I like conquering whole continents...

spend less on espionage? i'm teasing, that's not really possible, but i wonder if this is way worse than it was pre-BtS? i don't lag a lot, just a little, but i just about never lagged pre-BtS and there it was only during wars with zillions of units. now, it starts after i have enough EPs to get visibility on almost every city. at that point there's very little fog of war. even with holy vision pre-BtS i never had that much of the map active all the time, so i'm pretty sure that's what causes it for me, at least a big part of it anyway.

Seems strange that you're having such problems. My computer is fairly slow so when I play a huge map I'll often move across to my wife's 2.4ghz duel core for the late game. It's only 1gb ram with a 6600GT graphics, but it really runs the game pretty much flawlessly.

One thing I can suggest if you've been playing a long time is to save and restart the application. Civ4 has always seemed to have a bit of a memory leak that causes it go slower the longer you play.

Seems strange that you're having such problems. My computer is fairly slow so when I play a huge map I'll often move across to my wife's 2.4ghz duel core for the late game. It's only 1gb ram with a 6600GT graphics, but it really runs the game pretty much flawlessly.

One thing I can suggest if you've been playing a long time is to save and restart the application. Civ4 has always seemed to have a bit of a memory leak that causes it go slower the longer you play.

It was kinda OK until the unit count went up. Then it all went to hades.

What CPU is it? Is it a Core 2 Duo? A Pentium D?

If it's a Core 2 Duo @ 3.3Ghz, that's about as as fast it goes for today's computers. What is the 'terrible lag' like? Over-a-minute turn wait times? The slowest it goes for me is about 20-30seconds per turn in the late game (mostly during wars when the AI is moving all their units around).

(Mine is a Core 2 Duo OC'ed to 3.0Ghz - heh, I also have an X1900XT!) :P

What CPU is it? Is it a Core 2 Duo? A Pentium D?

If it's a Core 2 Duo @ 3.3Ghz, that's about as as fast it goes for today's computers. What is the 'terrible lag' like? Over-a-minute turn wait times? The slowest it goes for me is about 20-30seconds per turn in the late game (mostly during wars when the AI is moving all their units around).

(Mine is a Core 2 Duo OC'ed to 3.0Ghz - heh, I also have an X1900XT!) :P

It's a Core-2 Duo OC'ed to 3.3 GHz. And as I mentioned in the original thread, I totally don't mind the turn wait. That's fine, even if it were a few minutes long I could read in between. What the big problem is, is the lag. I realize lag is a multiplayer term, but it actually is the best way to describe what's going on. While in the city screen, just going to click to queue a building takes several seconds to register. Because of this its easy to click the wrong building, or wrong unit. Click a unit several times to queue, and it takes a while to respond to the mouse click - and then blam they all click in at once. It's like there's a bunch of stuff being calculated in the background - of course nothing should be going on because the turn is over it's my turn now. (I'm not even in map view, I'm in city management view.)

Are there any background processes running? That's all I can think of.

Are there any background processes running? That's all I can think of.

Only redering a DVD movie in realtime probably ;)

No just kidding, i have issues with this too. Im gonna try to end my games pre-modern age from now i guess, until i get my new computer :)

Are there any background processes running? That's all I can think of.

Believe me, I wish it were as easy as that. I have zero going on in the background. One curious thing is the dual core sharing is kinda sporadic. Not sure if it would work better on a single core. Too bad they could just offload one process to the secondary core (like message pop-ups). I have a feeling that process interrupts the flow info quite a bit.

Believe me, I wish it were as easy as that. I have zero going on in the background. One curious thing is the dual core sharing is kinda sporadic. Not sure if it would work better on a single core. Too bad they could just offload one process to the secondary core (like message pop-ups). I have a feeling that process interrupts the flow info quite a bit.

I think the dual-core CPU might be part of the problem - I have read of a number of people complaining about bad performance and most have dual-core processors - I still run a single core 3ghz with only 1Gb RAM and I don't find the performance at later stages to be that bad. Maybe the game isn't configured to offload various processes to the other cores and uses only half your processing power?

Hmm, strange that you experience so much lag on your machine. My lag (on a slower machine, and with larger than huge maps) went away when setting the graphics quality to low (single unit graphics, low resolution textures, etc.), but you probably tried this already. I usually play with high quality settings until Optics or Astronomy, and then lower the settings when the lag becomes noticable.

You could experiment with a mod where all unit costs are doubled. That would mean fewer units = faster gameplay.

I've found the number of civs that survive into the later peroids has a big effect.

For example...... I always play huge-marathon with around 12-18 opponents.

If I reach around 1800 or so....and there's 16 or so civs around........ it's laggy as hell. If I reach 1800, and there's about 5 civs left.... the lag is way way less.

The number of units doesn't seem to have as much influence..... 1000 units divided between 5 civs will move pretty quickly..... 1000 units divided between 16 civs, will take ages for the turn to end.

What's your virtual memory set to in windows? Perhaps try cranking it up a bit, mines set at 2gig.


Also the obvious thing would be to lower your video settings, and turning off graphical displays (like yields, and resources)


I think theres an option for detailed terrain, make sure that is off as well

I had my memory on auto and it was using ~2 Gig. Maybe I should defrag and set it to manual size of min/max 3072 (3 Gig)?

Jimbob - interesting post. I'll have to keep track of # Civs/speed/ and # of units.

No, you want to use a fixed swap file. Make it 2GB and no more.

If you have it on auto, Windows farts about wasting cycles and access times by changing its size. A lot.

No, you want to use a fixed swap file. Make it 2GB and no more.

If you have it on auto, Windows farts about wasting cycles and access times by changing its size. A lot.

Dumb question... why no larger than 2 Gig?

Well, I am saying that..

It all depends on your system. Tbh, there isn't anything you can be doing that would use more than 2GB Swap file, plus say 1GB or 2 off DDR Ram. Depends entirely on which OS you are using too.

Having 4GB Swap file and 4GB ram would be useless, swap files were far more important to systems running smoothly when it was PII/PIIIs with 64-256Mb of RAM.

You want to use the swap file for your main application as little as possible, its slow as well your I/O system. Which is dog slow in comparison to live ram.