Civ 3 on older Machines

[Edmo]

Hello to all,
I've got an older pentium 233mmx machine with 64mb ram. I am fully aware that it's below the required specs.

I've been playing the game for a couple of hours, and altough not flashy like Quake3 it's still playable. But I wonder, as I am still in ancient times, will it get absurdly slow later on?

Anyone has had any experiences with a similiar hardware setup? Is it playable in later Ages? I can always play the game in my girl's machine, which is several times faster than mine. Altough playing pc game is not what I'd like to do when around her...

Thanks in advance.

 

[Shaitan]

I'm running a Celeron 400 and have noticed a definite slowdown later in the game. Playing on a small map, I have no real problems at all. Standard size map gives a turn lag of around 5-10 minutes late in the game.

 

[Edmo]

5 to 10 minutes!?!?! Thank god I've gotta plenty of reading to do. Maybe I can read a few history books and atlases to catch up with History. Or maybe play SMAC instead...

Thanx anyway. :crazyeyes

 

[History_Buff]

Judging by how slow it is at the end of the game on a 1.5 Ghz computer, I'f start knocking off opponents NOW.

 

[connor]

I have a PII 333 w/ 128 MB RAM and find it not too bad. My problems are when playing on a huge map with 16 civs where my turns take a couple of minutes each. To address this problem, I mostly now play on large maps with no more than nine civs total. My turns run about 30 seconds apiece.

To help out, turn off all unnecessary resources, such as DSL connections, firewalls, etc., and have nothing else open, even not using 3D wallpaper and the like.

 

[Shaitan]

Also, turn off animations and sounds and the option to view your automatic moves. That helped me incredibly.

 

[Alexnm]

I play on a 400 MHz K6-2, with 256 MB RAM. More memory helps a lot. I have upgraded recently, and before that, I had 64 MB... the game was very slow, especially on huge maps. Now everything is fine.

 

[simwiz2]

I have a celeron 366 mHz, 64 mb RAM, and no sound card. Civ3 freezes about 50% of the time when going into diplomacy; the other 49.9% of the time I have to save and reboot as soon as I leave diplomacy because it becomes unplayable. This is with all sounds off. Time lag from giving a unit an order to it being obeyed (fortify, build mine, etc) is usually about 2 seconds each (it REALLY adds up). Game-killing crashes (where a game is permanently lost) are common. The AI turns are probably the one thing that works great on my computer, they are fast and I know people with computers about 5X faster than mine where turns take alot longer. Usually each AI takes about 5 seconds to move. So in a standard map the AI turn times are acceptable.

 

[Shaitan]

Originally posted by simwiz2
I have a celeron 366 mHz, 64 mb RAM, and no sound card. Civ3 freezes about 50% of the time when going into diplomacy; the other 49.9% of the time I have to save and reboot as soon as I leave diplomacy because it becomes unplayable.

In this case, try playing with sounds on. I know it's crazy but I had the same problem on a system with no sound card. I had sound effects turned off and had intermittent crashes. Turn the sound effects on and no more crashes.

Your processor is okay (comparable to mine) but more memory is critical to this game running well. It keeps a crazy amount of data resident in memory.