S L O W Civ 3?!

[kris55]

Hi,

I am having a real hard time trying to play civ 3 conquests!

After about 20 min of normal speed turn time, it slows down to nothing!

I am playing a game now and its taking 20 min to complete ONE turn!!!
Its making it un-playable!

Its also gone very slow in scrolling...

I am playing it single player mode at the moment, but its even worse in multiplayer games!

Would an AMD 64 processor run it faster then the P4 i have now?

Please if anyone can give any information about how i can speed up, i am starting to not play it anymore as its taking hours to do anything!

Extra Information

When playing i have it on "real time" or "High" processes

I have up-to-date drivers for graphics card and everything and directX9c

I am using a 3.2Ghz P4 1Mb cache Processor with 1Gb memory

And the computer used for multiplayer is the same apart from 512mb memory and 512kb cache memory for the processor.

[ainwood]

Civ3 is fairly slow when it has to deal with large numbers of cities. Are you playing on huge maps by any chance?

If so, then try playing on standard maps - they are fine. In terms of your PC, no, I don't think a faster one will help much (and Athlon won't be much different from Pentium). It might make a small difference, but certainly won't reduce it from 20 minutes / turn to a few seconds.

That said, your PC seems to be fairly high-end (compared to what was around when Civ3 was released). Do you have many other programs running? Have you got some spyware or similar (try adaware from www.lavasoftusa.com - its free and will remove a lot of spyware that might be hogging your system resources).

[kris55]

Hi!
Thanks for your reply!

I only use standard size maps.
Nope, i have no other progarams running, close everything before i play.
Spyware is the problem, i do have spybot and ad-aware but i think there is something still on my system slowing it down, AVG don't find any viruses, but its something making my internet explorer have a life of its own. (downloading windows update in hope)

So if i build smaller islands on the map editer the game would run faster... but would the AI be as much a challenge? How can i make the AI a good fight but with out slowing it down so 4 turns takes 2 hours?

I have done some editing of CIV over some time, changing the things the advice people say, but that shouldn't slow it down, i did add a MOD pack, but it ran like a car with no fuel so i stopped using it...

My system does get very hot when playing CIV and i found that cooling the CPU down made it a hell of a lot faster, but i have just changed my case, that should make it cooler but if anything its made it hotter... shame we can't put an air conditioner in the case!

Thanks in advance