How can I speed up the game?

[remconius]

I have the following system:
Intel Core2Duo 6600 2.4Ghz, 2GB memory
Geforce 8800 GTS

The game is running fine although graphics are a bit laggy sometimes. This is manageable and I could turn down the settings to fix this.

My main problem is that the game in later stages is becoming so slow that it's almost not manageable.
I am playing a large map, at around 1600AD. Each turn takes around 30 secs or longer when I press next turn. I am in a builder phase to increase culture and happiness but I am just sitting at the computer waiting for it. Change one or two things, press next turn and wait 20-30 secs. Spend hours just waiting.

I could play smaller maps, eventhough I want to finish my current game. But in the long term I want play huge games of course....

I would like to know what I can do to increase gamespeed?

1. Are there any ingame settings or .ini settings I can change to improve the speed?
2. Will a coming patch improve the speed?
3. Will increasing memory to 4gb or more make a big difference?
4. Will a better graphics card make a big difference?
5. Last resort, upgrade the whole system to quad core or more. I would prefer to avoid this.

Thanks for the support.

[MarkJohnson]

I have a quad core i7 620 with hyper threading, 6gb memory, and 5870 overclock video card and I get horrible lag on my huge map. I think it's more of a game issue than anything else. Save your money and hope they fix things quickly. or better yet, they release the 64-bit version they're suppose to be working on.

[gunnergoz]

I can play with a dual core laptop, 4GB RAM and 512MB Nvidia 8800M GTS video - with lag. Try going to the strategic map to process your turn - it really speeds things up.

[The Keeper]

So I haven't bought the game yet - I downloaded the demo to see how it would run.

I'm not surprised it didn't run on my home system (it is 5 years old). I installed it on my work laptop - dell E6500. On the demo, it seems to run slowly. So does this mean it would be almost unplayablely slow if/when I get the full game?

[remconius]

Last night I made some changes that seemed to help.

I did a clean install of the beta nvidia drivers 260.xx. Then I went into the nvidia control panel and tweaked the settings of Nvidia to improve performance instead of quality.

Then I turned down some of the graphics settings in the game.

This seemed to improve the performance and waiting time. It's 10-15 secs between turns... More or less manageable.

I am wondering how much difference memory makes.