Lagging when playing on the LAN

hello,
just recently bought gold edition civ-iii and wanted to play it with my son, but for some reason there was a lagging... not terrible, probably 1-3 sec delay between the time you select your unit or order it to move somewhere and the time your unit is selected or your command is excecuted... this little but annoying delay actually kills any wish to play multiplayer... my computers are only 3 metres apart, and the game is not graphics intensive - age of mythology is running with no delays on our computers, my version is 1.27f (the last two digits, i'm not sure about right now but it is the latest version, i checked it on this site).

another question is what's wrong with communicating with a human player?? my son found me, i right-clicked his scout, selected to initiate a contact and the same picture as you would with a computer rival, but the text was completely mess... some red messages about trading or not trading, and everything was not aligned...

would appreciate any ideas regarding my problems. thanks

1 of your comps probably isn't good enough for mp game of c3c. Probably not enough memory or something like that. It doesn't need much from graphic card.

First of all, turn off the "font smoothing" that CIV3 recommends... it clears up some of the diplomacy texts.

As for the lag, I have it myself. I tied to run it myself on a Penitum4 3.0 computer, 9800 PRO graphics card and 512 MB of ram - to no avail. It still lags. ?!?!?!? Can't help you here, but i pray somebody sees this post and helps me fix this problem :S

-kirby

thanks guys for your replies.
if it's going to lag, i'm unlikely going to play a multiplayer session...
one comp is p-IV, 2.4, 512 etc, another one is celeron 1.8 or 2.0, 256 - i think it's more than enough to play a game like civ-iii... gotta be something else...

Hello,

Regarding lag, check to see that you don't have any other programs running in the background, especially microsoft anything or instant messenging programs.

Have fun!

The game always lags anyway. Even though everybody on the network have a very good internet connection, it's still lagging. (It even lags with turn based)

And I find strange that in order to chat I need to hit alt + ^ + ^
I'm not impressed at all by ptw's multiplayer, there is no way modern games should lag, imagine turn based games...

To chat, just press ~ (at least that's all I do in C3C). As for turn based, try moving to simultaneous to speed things up a bit ;-)

Moving simultaneously helps things go much faster, and as for the lag you're referring to, I think everyone has that no matter what. Don't worry, you'll get used to it real quick and after twenty turns or so you won't even notice it... at least that's been the case with us.

I'm a bit dissapointed about the lag myself, Running 2 P4 machines with gobs of RAM and sweet video cards and a 100 Mbit switch with just those 2 machines on it, it runs exactly the same as my multiplayer games over the net... there has to be something wrong with that.

civnet which is older then dirt doesn't lag and this does. And amazingly enough it does lag even in turn based ??

I love civ3 but something really needs to be done with their networking code.

I think there is something really wrong in your own computer settings. I have played over 1000mp games in internet and mostly there is no lagging.