Specs needed for Really Big Maps

I'm looking at buying a new computer, and one of the major considerations is getting something that'll play Civ3 Really Big Maps (180x180) with lots of civilizations (31) well. Right now this type of map takes several minutes between turns for me once I hit the 1600s or so, which is obviously unacceptable. I probably won't have a chance to test the machine I get before buying it, so I'd like to ask what those of you who can play this type of map well have for your configuration.

It's less the speed of the processor and more the amount of ram you have.

I haven't played a huge map in a long time, but my 3500+ w/ 1 gig ram did pretty good. Quite a bit faster than the older machine.

Ive got to interject hopin this sparks debate. Im all for sayin its power of processor,once and this important, once youve met at least 500mb with a seprate v card 64mb minium

THis come from playin Robs' Anno' mod on a 190x190 with 1G of ram and a 1.9 processor.

I picked up a second computer startin with a mere 500mb but packing a 3.2 Athelon processor. THis setup killed no question turn times on the old stack and it used the same mod and map size. (plus same number of civs, 20)

Quintillus said:

I'm looking at buying a new computer, and one of the major considerations is getting something that'll play Civ3 Really Big Maps (180x180) with lots of civilizations (31) well. Right now this type of map takes several minutes between turns for me once I hit the 1600s or so, which is obviously unacceptable. I probably won't have a chance to test the machine I get before buying it, so I'd like to ask what those of you who can play this type of map well have for your configuration.

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OK no biggie but ya I was right. Im more into these things though since Mega huge is all I play.
The processor is the most important thing you can consider since your new computer will come packing over 500mb. The best you can do is forget about dual-coe they add nothing to Civ3, civ4 or most other games.

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Ive seen the most amazing results and now confirmed its the best you can buy and good news, not the most expensive!
Its what you want and what will happen when you get the same specs. IM talkin blur times right here ANd it was on a 3.2 Athlon 64

I promise on everything and would retire in shame proven wrong, that a 256 mb video card, 1gb of memory and most important!, the processor Athlon64,3.2G will give you the best performance thats ever been seen on CIv3.

On a 60% water, continents, with heavy trading between 20 civs -late game and literially thousands of units on the map, I played a mod made to expand all files "including tech, impr,wond, units and ,resources without ever waiting more then 30seconds.

After extensive research by leading members on the forums and countless dollers in tech testing. I can proudly declare we have reached the pinncale in perfect turn times on Mega Maps and the specs above are what you want to utilize CIv3 to the fullest!
Ive been one of the few lucky few to have reached the peak perfomance summit and must say loud and clear for all to hear: "Its all good from way up here, watcha waiting for? Come on up, an bring some beer

So its all about CPU power, RAM is not so important right?..

I have old o Athlon 4200 dual core, with 2GB DDRII (1gb*2) memory, and it is kinda pain in the a*s when playing 320*320 or similar sizes, as i always do. Always having free time do other stuff in my room while making a turn

I use a AMD Phenom X4 9150e Quad-Core processor and 5GB memory and it works pretty smoothly.

Sim_Fan said:

I use a AMD Phenom X4 9150e Quad-Core processor and 5GB memory and it works pretty smoothly.

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Its like, you dont wait at all when making a turn on a huge map somewhere in 4th era when all the territory is covered by cities?.

So the processor speed is critical? My laptop runs at 1.8 GHz Intel(R) Pentium(R) M
with 2GB RAM and 128 mb video card. It carries the game very well, but recently it has been refusing to load this very large map i created (320x320). When I load the game, it goes to "Configuring AI" and then the game just exits, no alert or other msg. Its kind of frustrating since I spent quite a lot of time creating this map. I was wondering if its size is the problem or if this is a game issue that can be fixed. I have v1.22.

Processor speed is the critical factor in Civ3 once you get to the minimums in RAM (512 MB XP/1 GB Vista), and the GPU (pretty much any 21st century dedicated card and most 21st century integrated ones as well - I'm sure yours is fine even if that's integrated video memory). Doubling from 512 MB to 1 GB in XP a few years back didn't affect my Civ3 performance at all, although it did help a lot in Civ4.

But if the game is exiting with no warnings or anything, that almost sounds like perhaps it's an error in the mod - did you test it often as you were making it? The smallest errors can cause odd behavior if you are using custom rules. And does it work well if you try it without custom rules?

Your processor sounds a bit weak for that big of a map. 1.8 GHz Pentium M looks like about 3.2 GHz on the Pentium 4 scale, and having played 180x180 on a 2.66 GHz Pentium 4 (what I had at the time of the first post), I can tell you a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 equivalent won't be that fast on that map. But it should at least load it and play it without crashing. I'd expect perhaps having to wait a few minutes for the AI to configure, but eventually, it ought to load.

The other question that comes to mind is the operating system you have. I don't assume you have Vista on a Pentium M laptop, but if you do, that could be causing the problem - Vista isn't the most Civ3-friendly OS ever.

If you want someone else to test it and see if it works, I'd be willing to fire it up and see if it loads, and at least look and see if there's anything that is definitely causing a crash in the mod. Conquests 1.22 is pretty standard around here.

Ha! You were right. I restored default game rules and the map loaded ok. It wasn't a problem of processing speed after all. Do you have any guesses which rule modification is likely to have caused the crash?

Thanks a bunch.

No, but you could probably upload it to the C&C forums and they could look at it.

Hey guys
Still, dont understand..

My config is athlon x2 4200+, with 2x1GB 667MHz RAM and GF7900gs 256MB card.

When the turn is in progress PC load is:
Physical memory about 52%
Virtual memory 34%
And CPU Core #1 48% (peaks at 50%) Core #2 62% (peaks at 67%)

With an antivirus, wmplayer and iexplorer running in background (included).

Looks pretty good, half of resoyurces are being used. But turns are like 15-20 minutes, depending on peace/war time when evertone start move their units, and conquaring cities, it takes me 3-4 minutes to aquire the city (after pressing on "Great, install a new governer")... Map is 256x256 World map with all civs, after all eras researched. ....Yeah a lot, does the civ uses only half of CPU and RAM??..

Can you set the executable to only run on one core? Civ3 wasn't designed to run on a multicore processor. My understanding of multicores is they run less efficiently when an app hasn't been programmed to run on a multicore.

Try it and see if you get a performance increase.

No effect on the game performance, the core with civ3 on it was really overloaded though, holding at 100% constantly And I do have AMD Dual Core optimizer software installed...

I don't know how this impacts more modern, dual/quad-core systems, but IIRC, the bottleneck in Civ3 is the L2 cache. The bigger that is, the better.