late game lag.

[phlayme]

g'day everybody.

i've noticed on my PC that late in the game on a huge map it tends to slow down a little between turns. its not crippling but it could always be better right? anyway i have an athlon500 with 128mb of ram and a semi decent video card. the problem is i can only pry a limited number of funds from the good lady wife in order to upgrade. would an athlon 1.4gig with another 128mb do the trick or is it always gonna slow down? what do you guys use?

 

[shirleyrocks]

I have a Dell PIII 750 w/256meg of RAM. My only real gripe about lag is having to watch the computer make 10,000 useless moves inbetween turns. The 30 or 40 second period of wait time (late game, large maps) as Civ3 legitimately churns through end of turn calculations doesn't really bother me. :crazyeyes

 

[vihutuo]

I play on a 1 ghz tbird ,256mb,32 mb tnt2. The game is quite slow in huge maps 8 civs but playable(40-45 secs delay between turns in the modern age) on large maps. Try playing in large maps. It's much faster than huge maps

 

[GreenLantern]

Several other threads have mentioned the lag. In my case, a 1.4 ghz Athlon, 16 Civs on Huge Map, takes about 2 minutes to calc the A.I. turn after 1500 A.D. It is roughly the same whether you have 128 meg or 640 meg (I upgraded and couldn't observe the difference). Near as I can tell, this is about as good as it gets for anyone.

 

[skintigh]

I have a 800MHz althlon, 384 MB pc133 cl2 ram, geforce 2 video, and the computer takes 5-15 minutes per turn, and thats just my workers. I can't see any enemy units.

Just manually moving a worker from one side of the huge map to another (straight shot along railroads) can take 15 seconds.

I guess they found the world's slowest algorithm to compute the shortest path.

 

[GreenLantern]

Originally posted by skintigh
I have a 800MHz althlon, 384 MB pc133 cl2 ram, geforce 2 video, and the computer takes 5-15 minutes per turn, and thats just my workers. I can't see any enemy units.

Just manually moving a worker from one side of the huge map to another (straight shot along railroads) can take 15 seconds.

I guess they found the world's slowest algorithm to compute the shortest path.

There is a preference to turn off some annimations. It can help a little bit with this.

 

[Loopy]

Originally posted by phlayme
anyway i have an athlon500 with 128mb of ram and a semi decent video card. the problem is i can only pry a limited number of funds from the good lady wife in order to upgrade. would an athlon 1.4gig with another 128mb do the trick or is it always gonna slow down?

Your biggest bottleneck with this system is probably your CPU, the second your RAM. Working with huge maps and a large number of civs will give you a long time between turns no matter what though.

Think about it this way: how long does it take for you to move around all your units and decide what to build late game when it's your turn? Is the computer taking longer per turn for each civ for which it has to make the decisions? Just as you have more decisions to make late game, so does the computer.

Upgrades are relatively cheap now. I'd suggest trying to get your good lady wife addicted to Civ 3, to the point where she's complaining about time between turns. You may find your limited number of funds to be less limited then.

 

[costanza]

I've played civ3 on two different machines:

One is a dell precision 1.4 gigahertz with 128 megs of that pc800 ram, and has a geforce 2 card.

The other is my own athlon 750 with 512 megs of pc133 ram and a voodoo 3 (3DFX forever!!).

Both have same HD speeds.

The second computer is much much faster. And I would love to have that one at work because with all that extra ram, I can switch tasks very quickly. On the dell, it takes way too long to even start and stop the game.

I'm not dissin' Dell; my theory is that even though it has a much faster processor and much faster RAM, the amount of RAM the second one more than makes up for it.

By the way, they're both running XP, which I know could make a difference again with the ram amounts.

 

[GreenLantern]

Originally posted by costanza
I've played civ3 on two different machines:

One is a dell precision 1.4 gigahertz with 128 megs of that pc800 ram, and has a geforce 2 card.

The other is my own athlon 750 with 512 megs of pc133 ram and a voodoo 3 (3DFX forever!!).

Both have same HD speeds.

The second computer is much much faster. And I would love to have that one at work because with all that extra ram, I can switch tasks very quickly. On the dell, it takes way too long to even start and stop the game.

I'm not dissin' Dell; my theory is that even though it has a much faster processor and much faster RAM, the amount of RAM the second one more than makes up for it.

By the way, they're both running XP, which I know could make a difference again with the ram amounts.

I started playing on a 1.4 ghz Athlon with 128 meg RAM. It seemed slow in "the big game", waiting about 2 minutes at 1500 A.D. I upgraded to 640 meg RAM and I didn't notice the difference much ~ still about a 2 minute wait. I am running Windows ME, which is a little snappier with 640 meg, but the game is about the same.

 

[Zippo]

Everyone seems to have this problem... all I can say is email Firaxis requesting a patch!

 

[jc011]

Yeah, it's so slow, I have 700mhz, and it is a pain watching everything.

I try to turn off the animations at the preferences but it doesn't work, I mean it doesn't work, still animations and all that crap, Can anyone help me???

 

[Zippo]

Originally posted by jc011
...

I try to turn off the animations at the preferences but it doesn't work, I mean it doesn't work, still animations and all that crap, Can anyone help me???

Actually, the "No Animations" option works... it just works 100% literally... not the way we would imagine. No Animation turns of the animations, but it still shows the units moving.

See, every unit has a host of animation files that civ3 plays when a unit moves. With No Animations OFF, it still shows the unit moving but doesn't play the animation files.

It's simliar to how chess pieces move on a game like Chessmaster. You see them move, but they don't have any arms swinging or anything.

 

[sianews]

I'm on a 1GHZ, 256MB RAM machine and with 8 civs on a large map in the year 900 I have 1 minute of wait time between turns .

 

[jc011]

ahhh, thanks zippo!

 

[Achinz]

I just wonder how they justify specifying a minimum system of 300 Mhz and a mere 32 MB ram

Is there a consensus then that 512 Mb ram makes a significant difference to the speed in the end game?

 

[skintigh]

Man, it gets worse.

It was taking about 15 minutes a turn (I must have 100 workers, yet not much gets done as 20 pile up in the same square) so I thought I could speed things up by slaughtering all but one or two cities of the last civ.

In the process I captured a few dozen workers, now I've been waiting over 20 minutes and the computer is still moving workers around.

Yes, animation has been off since BC. It's 1984 now, but at this rate it'll be a month before I finish.

Luckily I have a another computer to surf on while waiting.

 

[jason17]

I have 2 games on huge map that I would like to finish if they can fix lag b/c mine takes about 8 mins with p3 700 386mb ram.. there has to be some glitch and it better be fixed

 

[AUDoc]

I find it useful. I've been playing a huge map with the maximum number of civs. I get a lot of studying for exams done between turns... :grad:

 

[Vasikka]

Is there any way to turn off the showing worker moves? I have no interest what my workers are doing, I'd like to skip the waiting part and go directly to the next turn. This is worse than in civ2, I have to wait 1-2 minutes every turn to change and I have just begun the modern age! Damn, I am thinking of disbanding all my workers.

 

[IceCascades]

It's so slow on a huge map with 16 civs - a game takes doubly as long, because there's so much lag.