Are minimum system requirements enough?

[MortalCoil]

Hi there,

I am looking to buy CIv 3 as a Christmas present for my dad, who has a Pentium II 300 with 224 MB SDRAM, and a voodoo 3 card. Will this be enough to play the game? I know what the minimum requirements are, but i was wondering if he will have to turn off details in order to play the game.

Thanks!


Mortal Coil

 

[Captain Pugwash]

Maybe I can help a liitle bit

On the box it says minimum requirement 300Mhz Pentium II, but I play Civ3 on a 266Mhz portable and it loads and works fine. Dunno about the other requirements cos my portable met all those. I also still use Windoze98 not XP.

I was a bit concerned but thought I would take a chance and it works fine for me.

 

[Richard III]

I've got a 350mhz IBM Ispirati that stopped being modern in early 1998. Civ3 works great until 1AD, slows to an irritating level through to about 1500 and I start getting pissed at how grindingly slow it is after about 1750, where the graphics begin to get visibly drained - although not unplayably so.

But quite frankly, Civ3 really IS a killer app, and I've been saving to buy a 1.8 gig beast with a shiny flat screen after Christmas exclusively to play my baby on (oh and mebbe a little Max Payne during snowstorms).

So, look at it this way. If the Pentium II works, great. If, on the other hand, your gift drives your father into penury and debt by forcing him to buy new hardware, what's the problem? Just look at it this way: he'll be happy in his poverty, and you'll have done your bit to keep the Western economy alive in these our times of trial.

It's a public service, really.

R.III

 

[cutiestar]

I played my civ III on my fathers comp the other week, he has a 300 mhz and 92 Ram, and crap graphics card, basically his computer is about 4 years old, and the game went fine, fractionally slower than my beast, but didn't even bother me, considering i am use to fast, that is pretty good

 

[Cerryl]

It'll run better with the 1.16f patch installed, than it will right out of the box.

 

[Gumby3000]

I think it depends also a little on which resolution you play.

I mean I have 733MhZ TNT2 128MB RAM

and playing on 1280x1024 and loading takes sometimes quite a long time.

 

[slothman]

I got 350 mhz, 32 meg ram and 4 meg vram and it seem to work fine. It's a little slow but not much.

 

[Zant]

I play on a pII 300 64mb with an ATI rage something or other with only 4 mb and I can play in any resolution without any noticable additional lag *granted I didn't play above standard res long due to the patch adding those ghost boxes*

Now I play without any problems in the stadard resolution. Also if you don't have enemy moves animated/shown on it'll do the turns quickly aswell.

 

[Gumby3000]

What does the patch do to your game.
Ghost boxes on higher resolutions. To behonest I've never heard of it. What exactly happens?

 

[Zant]

To play in a higher res I have to put keepres=1 in the ini file. When I do that and I set my windows res higher than the res the game defaults in the black outlining of the city name/population/growt/production box gets displaced. That's the only problem I had with the patch.

When I don't add the keepres=1 and just play in the default resolution for civ3 I have no problems with it though.

 

[Gumby3000]

Kind a strange

I don't have those problems.