8 minutes and 17 seconds!

[Tapok]

That's how long it took from me to hit the red button at the end of one of my turns to load the next turn - judging the "next turn" as the "What would you like to build next?" menu.

I'm running BtS's UK release, playing the largest possible map (I think) with 10 civs (including me) left in the running. My machine has 3gbs of RAM, a dual core intel 1.8ghz processor, and a GF 8600GT graphics card.

What on earth could be behind nearly 10 minutes of loading time? How can I cut it down? It's my day off, and I want to be gaming, not waiting for it to do what it should be doing!

Aaargh

 

[RockTheCazbah87]

Somethings up here for sure. My PC's got 2gbs of RAM, and even in the Modern Age it takes 1, 2 mins max to end turns.

 

[LiberiGlacialis]

What are you patched to? I have Solver's Patch/3.03 (and Vista...>>), ~1GB of RAM, and Modern Era turns take as long as Rock's....

 

[Psyringe]

Did you play with the option "show friendly moves" checked? If so, and if you've got line of sight with many AI cities (due to having many vassals and/or investing a lot into espionage), then the inter-turn time increases a lot while the game shows you in detail how the AI keeps shifting its units around (which it does a lot). If that's the case, then unchecking "show friendly moves" will greatly reduce the inter-turn wait time.

Other possibilities include excessive memory paging (which will make turn times very slow), but basically your machine is too good for that, the game shouldn't need to page anything in or out when you have 3GB of RAM and a very good graphics card.

 

[MrCynical]

Hmm, I generally play large rather than huge maps, but in peace time modern age it is usually only about 10 - 20 seconds for the interturn, and that on a laptop with Vista and 2GB of RAM. Warfare slows it down a lot, might take a minute or two if there's a lot of civs at war, but I've never seen it above two minutes.

I'm assuming you've got show friendly/enemy moves and combat animations turned off? Displaying them wastes far more time than I've ever seen the interturn take. Otherwise I can't think what's causing the problem.

 

[blitzkrieg1980]

Patch to 3.02 not 3.03 and install Solver's patch. Don't install 3.03 as it replaces Solver's patch. Something is definitely up. I have an AMD X2 4400 with 2 gig ram and a GF7800 GTS w/ 256 ddr3 ram and my machine takes 30 seconds interturn for 18 civ huge earth map with 8 civs at war.

 

[Fugl]

agree, warlords ran great on my machine too
Someone made some really bad coding at Firaxis thistime around, reminds me civ3s playability in multiplayer in later part of game, wich was redicilous also

 

[blitzkrieg1980]

i find that warlords ran slower on my machine. The earth 18 map is the only exception... oh and blockading that takes forever.

 

[RockTheCazbah87]

oh and blockading that takes forever.

Same here. I wondered if that was a common thing...

 

[Tapok]

I've tried it with Rise of Mankind and vanilla Beyond the Sword now, and I'm still getting crazy times.

Hmm...

I'll try blitzkreig's suggestion.

 

[Solver]

My patch should also address the blockade speed issue, speeding it up 10-20 times.

 

[blitzkrieg1980]

Yeah, I forgot to mention that. The blockading issue did go away after solver's patch.

 

[BobTheTerrible]

I'm not a computer expert, but it could be your processor. I don't think civ is optimized for dual core stuff, and 1.8 Ghz really isn't that fast.

 

[LiberiGlacialis]

I'm not a computer expert, but it could be your processor. I don't think civ is optimized for dual core stuff, and 1.8 Ghz really isn't that fast.

1.8 GHz is the recomended ( i read the specs at times )....though THAT may still be too slow. I have a dual core 1.78, and it works fine.

 

[blitzkrieg1980]

I don't know if it's optimized for dual core, but my dual core AMD 4400 X2 with 2 gig memory has me waiting 20-30 seconds for an 18 civ Huge earth map with 8 civs at war.... not bad at all! I'm pretty sure a single core AMD with similar speed wouldn't handle that kinda data as well.

 

[Soneji]

It won't be optimised for dual core..

 

[blitzkrieg1980]

what won't be optimized?

1.8 GHz is the recomended ( i read the specs at times )....though THAT may still be too slow. I have a dual core 1.78, and it works fine.

seems that i'm not the only one who thinks the dual core helps out

 

[Psyringe]

The game will run a bit faster on dual core CPUs because Windows can run all its background processes on the second core. However, for a substantial performance increase the engine would have to be rewritten to make use of threading. This isn't really feasible at this stage, you either design a program from start to use threading or you leave it as one process. Trying to change this now would very likely add more bugs and problems than the speed increase would be worth.

 

[blitzkrieg1980]

agreed, but windows running background processes on the other core is a huge help when the system only has 1 gig of ram.

 

[Phydorex]

Game runs like ass for me also, particularly in the very beginning (initial exploration) and towards the end, I actually get stutter mousing around the map. Sometimes it goes away if I zoom in or out to a "sweet spot" at which point it runs fine for a few turns. I have it on low details and the animations off so its pretty puzzling to me, I don't have warlords but vanilla civ4 ran fine until I installed BTS

AMD 2.1 1 gig of memory geforce 6200, so I am beating every requirement under recommended but it still runs like crap, between that and the bugs (capitulation vassal espionage, captured cities on capitulated vassal borders getting their fat cross but continually going into revolt, and the annoying tendency of my friendly neighbors with the same religion and civics declaring war on me) I almost wanna stop playing entirely.