I'll be blunt this is long and boring. If you don't wanna read lots of stuff skip to the last paragraph.
Blarg said:
I used to play RTS game extensively years ago. Total Annihilation and Age of Empires 2, as well as some others to a lesser extent. But I played these two to an extreme amount. It was very common on games like these to have noticeable slowdowns for the reasons I noted. Lots of units, constantly changing position and stats as they gave and received damage, on big mpas, with lots of the other guy's units, too. 512 stank for games like these. 1 gig was decent, but slowdowns happened even then. Now these games came out quite a while ago! It has been years since I played them.
If it was true then that having a gig was extremely helpful in avoiding slow downs and even freeze-ups, when people typically played at much lower resolutions and with much simpler graphics, it logically follows that the same is the case today. The experience I describe was pretty much universally agreed on by everyone playing those games back then, too. And we always knew if someone had too little memory by how it slowed down the game for everyone else until his system caught up.
There were always the dissenters who claimed that things were fine on ANY machine imaginable, as long as it was the one they were playing. They were willing to accept virtually any level of slowdown, both for themselves and others. These pain in the butts often found themselves without opponents because nobody wanted to sit through a stuttering, freezing game that took four times as long to get played and was annoying throughout. Usually they eventually bought more memory, but some remained stubborn. They probably eventually just quit and complained about the user community instead of admitting their systems were a drag on them and everyone else.
I think it's clear this can happen in Civ 4 too, and will. It always happens.
Nevertheless, if someone wants to say that 512 is fine for games like these, and they weill REGARDLESS of its truth or untruth, fine for them. The truth is that a gig would make it much better, as has been the case for years now -- ages in terms of computer technology. Windows alone can take up 128 megs of RAM these days, leaving you with little left for what the game needs. Game sites are reporting that 2 gigs are actually closer to what some new games need to run best, and that 1 gig is no longer a ridiculously big number(it hasn't been for a very long time). In this context, proposing that 512 megs is anywhere near optimal is just wrong. It's not.
By the way, on some turn-based games years ago, like Civ 2 and Heroes of Might and Magic 2, a gig was far from overkill, and slowdowns were frequent even with the best processors around. Turn-based games are not exempt from the demand for high memory. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if tbey were especially bad with memory because a little stuttering doesn't screw things up much compared to how it can ruin RTS's or FPS's.
Ok so you're l33t and have been playing for so long your grandkids idolise you as a pro gamer etc etc. Anyways onto my rant.
You are arguing that people with 512 meg of ram are living in the past. I disagree. First I'll explain something, I'm a hardcore Counter Strike: Source player and have been since it's release. I ran it originally on my 512mb RAM box (PC3200 to be exact -_-) and I was averaging 40fps. On top of this I could run any game available at the time except one time Doom 3 crashed on me, because my drivers were outdated and it was about 40 degrees in my room. Anyways point being, if a PC can run any game currently available with 512 of PC3200 RAM, why the hell can't it run CIV IV smoothly? WTF is going on? Don't blame the people and how they're holding back gaming society, because not everyone sinks as much money into their gaming rig as you do. Not only that, the box says the minimum is 256 (ok we can discard that) but the reccomended is 512. So perhaps you should lay off just because your gaming rig makes mortals bow down before it. No I'm not finished yet.
Realising my CSS skills were improving I decided to update my rig slightly. Same video card (Radeon 9800pro 128mb) and processor (P42.8GHz with HT) but decided my motherboard and Ram needed some updating. Oh and my case too
So armed wih my cash I went out and splurged on 2 stick of Dual Channel 512DDR GeIL RAM. I can now run CSS at an average of 100-160 fps on average with no slowdowns whatsoever. Sure you may say I have graphics turned down. Currently they're set at 1024*768 with Anti-Aliasing set at 2x. I also have everything set to high and vSync is also on just cos it can be. Now surely if I can pwn noobs with a scout on this rig I can play some good old Civilization IV with no worries right? Sadly no. I open the game and it runs ok. Go to menu that's cool. I start the tutorial to see what's changed (not that much really). First thing I notice is the minimap is totally screwed over. It appears as a series of black lines running horizontally with a few bit of the world map inbetween the lines (ie about 2 pixels worth). That game was ok because I crushed the "tutorial" civ asap. Now onto the main game.
Simple setup, continents, 7 civs on a standard map. No major problems at the start. First problem I noticed was the wonder movies were either not playing at all (I can't play Solomon's Temple for some reason, it just stops at the start) or where stop starting with the music doing the same. This is occurring around 1700 from memory. Then the game started to seize up a wee bit which isn't cool because one thing that annoys me is when a game slow up after it's been running fine for ages and ages. Anyways next minute a foreign diplomat shows up and BAM the computer stop, screen turns off and the whole thing resets itself. No warning, except that Civ IV was slowing down. The PC reboots and it notes that WINDOWS (XP professional) has recovered from a serious error. Also my Radeon 9800pro has a serious error message O_o;. So I go ok that sucks and reboot it from the autosave. Funnily enough it loads me to just before I built Solomon's temple and once again the movie doesn't play and all other wonder movies are stuttering. I finally decide it's pissing me off too much so I won by diplomatic victory, sorely disappointed at how goddamn slow it all got.
Now onto my main point (besides *****ing about ppl who constantly whine that nobody is keeping up with technology just because they have money falling out of their arses). This game is not that graphically fantastic. As previously stated Black and White 2 is more graphically intense. Why you ask? because each model in B&W2 has a crapload more rendering, as does the entire WORLD. However the models in Civ IV are perhaps on par with... No they're not even as good as Warcraft III. Let's just sau they're about the same right? I can run a 12 person FFA on the largest map possible with my mates also joining in (they're comps are actually worse than mine ^^
and also have 8-9 CPU players running as well. Now if I'm thinking correctly here, my PC is running all of those players and me, which means that it is chewing up memory almost exponentially. WRONG The game ran smoothly right up to tech level 3 and we all pooned each other into the dust with units maxed out to buggery (ie we had about 10-11 players left) and all had their populations maxed out. No problems whatsoever. In fact the map animations would be more intense than those in CIV IV, not to mention the battle animations
So let's recap, 1gb dual channel RAM, a P4 2.8GHz, Radeon 9800pro, running CSS at 150fps on avg, can play as much crap as possible in a 12 player FFA map on Warcraft III (hosting), no problems. Civ IV however crashes and causes serious errors in Windows XP. It also has stuttering movies and poor sound quality. If my PC, which by no means is a godlike machine whatsoever, cannot run this game properly then there is something wrong with the programming, not people's hardware. I'm not asking it to run flawlessly, I'm asking it not to be a system hog and an unstable game. My conclusion is that there is a problem with the assigning of memory. Perhaps a memory dump error (had that happen a few times with other games that were patched and fixed), or as some suggested a memory leak, perhaps the same thing. So if this game cannot be played on 512mb of RAM, Firaxis better get ready for legal trouble.