how to get c2c to load faster

I heard there is a shortcut to make cavman2cosmos load faster, Is this true? and if so How do I set it up? Id like to do this as it takes at least 3 minutes or more to load c2c and then it still takes some time to load my saved game. Is there anything I can do to make it load faster. I already made the 3gigabite switch as I said in my world builder problem post?

Well there is the

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Beyond the Sword\Civ4BeyondSword.exe" mod="MODS\caveman2cosmos"

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command line to directly load the mod via a shortcut on the desktop. But that of course won't have the mod load faster as such.

Or you doubleclick on your savegamefile.
Starts CivIV, loads C2C and your savegame.

But still needs some time.

Install a solid state drive.

Installing a ssd was the best thing that I ever did in helping me play C2C on my old machine. Adding ram helped also, but I have 64bit win7. SSD's are cheap enough. I highly recommend everyone get one for windows and programs at least, use your main drive as a secondary(storage) if you have room. I do!
It helps tremendously with load times.

Well, I was just about to ask the same question.
The load times were especially noticeable during my recent freeze issues, where I'd literally spent hours to identify the cause as I had to terminate and restart the game quite a lot (and in rapid succession. Although "rapid" might not be the best word for that...).

And while I already do have an SSD (Samsung 830) and 16GB of RAM, it still feels like an eternity to load up the game. In fact, I just timed it, and it's ~1:20 for a fresh start of the game (and then another ~36 seconds for the save game, but I'm not concerned too much about that).

Also note that there's a destinctive difference if you're opening the game after a "clean" shutdown (i.e. normally exited the game) or open it after a prolonged time of non-use (e.g. set the computer into Sleep mode) or after having forcefully quit the game, e.g. via the task mananager.
In the former case it takes only ~33 seconds to start the game, I assume because some caching mechanisms are kicking in.

It would be interesting to know if you're somehow able to leverage these caching mechanism even for a fresh start / forceful quit (I assume a Memory Allocation Error also falls under this category), though I suppose if they're OS specific then we're out of luck. But if they are game specific (i.e. what about those "uncached XML files" you're seeing at start up?), this might be worth a shot.


And as a side note, I could also try to copy the whole game onto a RAM drive and see how it goes from there. Just for the kicks of it.

Normally after the first time you load subsequent loads will take about half as much time. That still ends up being 2 mins or so on my HDD machine (which is otherwise quite powerful), but that seems reasonable to me.

sp00n said:

And while I already do have an SSD (Samsung 830) and 16GB of RAM, it still feels like an eternity to load up the game.

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There's no significant difference between load times on SSD's and HDD's for C2C, the bottleneck is CPU.

MaXimillionZero said:

There's no significant difference between load times on SSD's and HDD's for C2C, the bottleneck is CPU.

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Yeah, I can second that.
I've just tried that RAM disk loading, and the result was... nothing. Load times still are exactly the same, 1:20/0:33.

I then overclocked my 3570k from 3400MHz to 4000MHz and the load time decreased to 1:08/0:27.
Might be worth to set my CPU back to permanent overclocking then (I had just disabled that some days ago...).

However that leaves us to another question: what is Civ4 doing that's so CPU intensive and can be cached (by the OS?) on startup?
And could it be optimized (some sort of precompilation)?

sp00n said:

And could it be optimized (some sort of precompilation)?

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It's already been optimized. Older versions took much longer.

Just be glad you're not in my boat and have to unpack the fpks to run the game (due to black tiles). It can take almost 10 minutes to load a game.

sp00n said:

Yeah, I can second that.
I've just tried that RAM disk loading, and the result was... nothing. Load times still are exactly the same, 1:20/0:33.

I then overclocked my 3570k from 3400MHz to 4000MHz and the load time decreased to 1:08/0:27.
Might be worth to set my CPU back to permanent overclocking then (I had just disabled that some days ago...).

However that leaves us to another question: what is Civ4 doing that's so CPU intensive and can be cached (by the OS?) on startup?
And could it be optimized (some sort of precompilation)?

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First time (or any time after the XML has changed in any way if you update the version you are running) the time is in parsing the XML and building the data structures the game uses at runtime. Subsequent times it loads a pre-parsed binary version from the previous run. However, even loading the binary version it has to translate it into runtime objects etc. which is fairly intensive. It also has to load all graphic resources from scratch every time.