What is a good processor that will enable someone to play a huge map with max civilizations in the late game so that the waiting time between turns is minimum? i just loaded a game save that was in the 1940 on a huge map with max civs. All the land was completely taken, and it took about 20-30 seconds to end a turn on my machine. I have an Intel Core 2 CPU T5600 @ 1.83GHz 1.83 GHz.

Doesn't sound to bad, do you have unit animations on?

Memory is also a limitation. How much RAM do you have?

Yes, i have unit animation on and i have 2 gigs of ram, although Vista no doubt hurts me here. I am running Vista.:(

Late in the game the pauses are really long. I have Athlon 2,8, 2 GB RAM and
running XP and still the period between turns was really annoying. Like in good old times when playing Championship Manager :) I just had to get a newspaper or book not to get bored too much.

I was playing a game as Incas. I developed quite nice, conquered China and HRE and then realized that there are seven more civs, really strong and some of them connected so I decided not to get to war any more. But - with your cities well protected with mechanized inf, tanks, stealth fighters and other kinds of inf, your scientific research already done - what else could I have done? So I was sitting with a paper, just pressing ENTER from time to time :lol:

Around 2022 I gave up. BTW - how long would the game last? (I was playing at 4th level of difficulty)

Firstly if you have it selected, uncheck "show friendly moves", that speeds things up quite a bit. Secondly, 20 secs or so isn't bad at all for a huge map in the endgame. Thirdly, CivIV does not utilize dual or quad core technology, so you're only actually using one processor to run the game.

Yes that is True, it only utilizes one processor I think....because I have Quad core 2.40 ghz with and 8800 gts and i play History in the Making MOD with Huge Earth map with 24 civs and when evrything develops trust me it takes around 30 secs+ still...it really keeps me from enjoying this game.
The developers need to allow people with duos and quads to take advantage..

Yes that is True, it only utilizes one processor I think....because I have Quad core 2.40 ghz with and 8800 gts and i play History in the Making MOD with Huge Earth map with 24 civs and when evrything develops trust me it takes around 30 secs+ still...it really keeps me from enjoying this game.
The developers need to allow people with duos and quads to take advantage..

The game engine was built before these were out. Unless you are willing to pay for their services to update the engine, no one is going to spend the time and money when they could be developing a new game that is better, and does support the new hardware.

To better put it, if given the opportunity, would you work for a month with no pay to update it?

Thats exactly why I'm ready and waiting for Civ 5 =)

The game engine was built before these were out. Unless you are willing to pay for their services to update the engine, no one is going to spend the time and money when they could be developing a new game that is better, and does support the new hardware.

To better put it, if given the opportunity, would you work for a month with no pay to update it?


Exactly, Civ IV doesn't even use multi threading to take advantage of dual core let alone quad core processors. This is what Civ V will probably do and reduce that wait time by a big chunk.

With Civ4 ITs true some of those dream machines from back in civ3's day are just as ideal today when wanting extreme fast turns when you play extra huge maps.

I take it you only played with in the confines of defualt map sizes. Later on, like in the course of civ3 evoultion, the maps tend to get bigger and start adding mega amount of civs, improvemnts and resources to the mix. Now you can start to see where the extra time gets factered in

Civ3 defauit huge was never to bad for old computers of the day but when modders started going nuts like Kel EL's map, then you saw the limitation of the engines at the time.

the Ultimate flagship/ best p4 ever made was called 3.6 cedermill. It came with abilty for 2gig of ram and standard 2mb of all important L2 cache. It will give you the best results in turn time process over any dual quad core if the graphics card equipt is also quality

New techcame later to help overclock and increase powersaving for the heat seeker turn obsessed like me. The best software for civ3 extreme turn speeds is called CoreCell by ATI.
I can clip 4.0 without to much noise. (2mb of L2 measn I rarly need to travel the pipe for virtual backup memory allocation-making top single core AMD advantages with short distances invalid)
This is the only negative thing a coredue can say to detract on remarkable extreme TOP MODEL ONLY pentium advantages when playing civ. THe power and heat is outrageous for the added benifit. IT won't let up ether(no coolin time trust me) SO Depends how much you like fast turns I guess