Game speed

Does anyone know how to speed up the game? Some turns take 5 minutes...

One simple way is to press Ctrl+P in-game or doubleclick on "Preferences" in Main Menu to disable "Show Friend Moves" and "Show Enemy Moves" if you haven't done it already. If you have a SSD Drive available, install the game there - it does improve turn times a lot. There are other possible tweaks one can do in a modded game. One is to disable Sea Trade for harbors and Air Trade for airports (and just add that features to 3-4 Palaces you can build in your empire). Others may know more.

If there isnt any fighting going on you can just hold shift which it gets rid of animations of movement and speeds up all movement speeds. I think this is available in Preferences too as a setting always on. This only affects what you see though.

Thanks guys!

Other basic PC tricks too, like making sure nothing else is running in the background, defragging your hard drive, upgrading hardware, etc.

Smaller map sizes help too, anything beyond 180*180 can be brutal mid to late game.

Are you looking to speed up a mod you are working on or just the game in general? As Ares pointed out, there are a lot of tricks modders can do to reduce turn times.

Ares de Borg said:

If you have a SSD Drive available, install the game there - it does improve turn times a lot.

Click to expand...

I can't imagine using an SSD would do much, if anything, to increase turn times for Civ III - although it would speed up initial load times (Especially large scenarios like 1989). For faster turn times - single-core processor speed, cache, and to a much lesser extent RAM (depending on what your system runs concurrently) would be more relevant. There's a big difference if I run Civ @ my processor's base of 3.5GHz and when I o/c a single core to 4.6GHz.

A couple other ideas would be to eliminate maintenance costs for buildings, eliminate espionage or certain parts of it, limit tech trading, limit/eliminate map trading, or limit/eliminate some diplomatic actions like mpp, rop, etc.

Hold on!... What do you mean by this; "just add that features to 3-4 Palaces you can build in your empire"

Btw You don't have to deactivate all animations, as you can also skip them by pressing the shift key. Took me just one and a half decade to find out

Sorry dp

Redback said:

Hold on!... What do you mean by this; "just add that features to 3-4 Palaces you can build in your empire"

Click to expand...

It's an alternative to no sea trade at all : You could reduce the number of possible trade points per civilization by just using the palaces (in my example Palace, Forbidden P., Summer P., Winter P.). Thus, the PC just needs to calculate a few knots in a trade network while you're still able to connect different continents.

In my current mod, I do something similar. Only Seafaring civs can build the Port improvement which allow for Sea Trade, but all Civs can build the Merchants Port Small Wonder which allows for the same.

The Balloon Field is a late game Small Wonder which is the only way you can get Air Trade.

The down side of this method is the decreased trade within the Civ, but this works fine within the culture of the mod.

Ares de Borg said:

It's an alternative to no sea trade at all : You could reduce the number of possible trade points per civilization by just using the palaces (in my example Palace, Forbidden P., Summer P., Winter P.). Thus, the PC just needs to calculate a few knots in a trade network while you're still able to connect different continents.

Click to expand...

...which is something the AI will never understand, will it?

You can also restrict sea trading by limiting it to the Commercial Dock and requiring specific resources to be within the city radius for the Dock. That works best with pre-made maps.

One other way I attack the problem is increase the resource yields of terrain and coast tiles to give more productive cities, which reduces the number that you need to have. That also reduces the number of trade lines that the computer has to determine.

Samez said:

Btw You don't have to deactivate all animations, as you can also skip them by pressing the shift key. Took me just one and a half decade to find out

Click to expand...

Just when youre thinking youre quite the clever modder and civ expert, suddenly you realize a hot-key you never knew existed...

been there...

Lmao, true!

Hold the Left Shift Key Down, Absolutely.
EFZI2 Complete would take far too long for the slow moving zombies to all move otherwise.

^Similar to the "hold shift key" you can use Capslock to skip animations and speed unit movement. No holding required. One can then "un-capslock" on their own turn if they desire.

Another thing that can slow the game down is having a lot of Barbarian Camps pre-placed, with the Barbarians set to Raging. On a Huge or larger map, this can slow things down quite a bit, especially when the camps start spawning Advanced Barbarian units.

Interesting thing about the shift option. I've already limited my air trade routes to a 'Customs house' building which require the capital building, and a special building called 'Trade post' which require resources within it's radius (usually by coasts), and completely scrapped naval trade routes. My harbors only increase food on water tiles, and commercial docks only increase trade on water tiles now.

In addition I gave these buildings a 'Naval bombard defense' of 1, so that they are target-able by enemy naval bombardments, clearing trade routes in late game wars to speed up the game when blown up, or simply using the functionality as a trade blockade effect.

It is also AI compliant since they will also bombard your cities with navies and break your improvements.

I'm interested in finding out if also giving these buildings an 'Air' value of 1 will make them more likely to blow up when an air attack is successful against it's city.

Note for random maps:

Limiting the AI to build trade routes only through a building which requires a resource that spawns on coastal tiles, and is within it's city borders in order to speed up the game can be AI compliant with some tweaks. Since the appearance is gonna be random, to reduce the chances of the AI possibly never being able to connect other land masses you'll have to create a sea worker.

With a sea worker the AI will build a road across oceans to connect other land masses to all of it's trade, and make that a worker priority for what I've seen in my tests. This way even if the appearance ratio was not a very fair one for the current map they can still connect land masses, and so will the human player.

Another thing to keep in mind would be to give pillage to some naval units, so they can disconnect trade routes in war times.

Remember you'll need an editor such as Quintillus to achieve this.

I've done these changes and my turn times are much better. Usually 30 sec to 60 secs in a 180x180 late game map. Well that and I don't allow settling on Ice or deserts along with settlers being auto-produced till the colonization era in the industrial age to slow down the pace of trade route making via road making and city building. In the original game by late game the whole world is railroaded and cities on every corner. That also slows down the game when the world is over developed with too many cities and trade routes through roads, and quite frankly not very realistic if you compare it to real life.