I have an amd 2500+ cpu, 1giga ddr ram, geforce ti 4600 128mb video card. I started to play on a player made huge map, 250x250 i think with 14 civs. I know with this kind map, once you hit industrial age, turns will take longer. I'm prepared for that. But what I wasn't prepared for is the long long long program not responding period. Whenever I finish my turn, it takes a minute for the computer to start their turn, during this time, if I bring up task manager, Civ3conquest.exe is listed as program not responding. but this is still tolerable. Whats untolerable to me is, when all the computers turn finished and game finished to notify me about my completed city improvement, the Game falls into another period of program not responding. only this time, its 5 to 10 minute long. I tried everything I can to fix it, I disabled all third party program, closed all apps in sys try. nothing changed. I even got to msconfig and selected diagnostic start, only loaded basic services. and for some reason, the game run worse than before.

One thing I noticed during the program not responding time. task manage shows that civ3conquest is using 99% of cpu power, when in fact nothing was happening. Can this problem be corrected?

I used to have the same problem. Windows was showing non responding, but then after further waiting, it finally came back. The turns are long, especially on huge maps....sit back and have a cola. I would start to worry after about half an hour.

Give it a bit more time and see what happens. Especially if you haven't encountered any problems on smaller maps.

Good luck

I have found that unless you get a message stating fatal error, the game in still going. I have done a cntrl+alt+del and windows shows CIV3 not responding, yet a few minutes later the it's my turn again.

I have had a turn last up to two hours on a very large map with 31 Civ's late in the game, wars going on with who knows how many units, maps having to be updated as towns are captured.

I usually just have Civ playing in the background while I do other things on the computer when playing a huge map. I now tend to play the standard size maps as they seem to be the best blend of size and response.

I am gettign the same problem the program just freezes. I tried to take everyones advice and I left it for three hours and then called no joy...

It seemst o freeze up right after telling me all my improvements at the begininng of my turn jsut before it switches back to a playable state to move my units...

Does anyone know why Civ III launches a new process called ~e5d14.tmp into the process mix on the machine. This is right when it crashes. If you kill that process then it kills civ III as well.

I'm having this same problem on multiplayer games... mostly on the modern era. I play PTW v1.27f with a friend against 8 computer players. The game will stop working at random years (has happened on 1812 and 1898) after finishing up a turn. The hour glass just comes up and eventually (after about 5 minutes) it drops the other human player.

Any known fixes/suggestions?