Civ III Complete Scenario Very Slow

[unveiler]

I am playing Civ III Complete scenario "ancient empires" that takes about 9.5 minutes between turns, sometimes lags when establishing a city or making a trade with another civ.

I recognize it is a huge map with a ton of civs, but that does not explain (to me) why there would be lags during a turn.

I have a Dell XPS 1710 bought 1/2006 running XP and never had this problem.

I have had my hard drive erased and re-loaded by an IT friend. No virus/malware problem, no storage, memory or speed problems. Latest drivers installed.

Since I love this scenario, I will deal with the slowness but if anyone can help or provide any direction to speed this up, I would be most grateful!

Edit: (same day) As I should have done prior to posting, I found a number of posts on this problem, most 8 or 9 years old. Suggestions were to make sure that as few programs as possible are running in the systems tray and to load drivers in a certain order (no specific direction on that order provided). Some concluded that map size and number of civs determines speed. While it appears there is no hope, I would willingly accept a miracle!

Thank you!

 

[Elephantium]

Welcome to CFC!

Sorry to disappoint you, but there's really nothing you can do about this. The way Civ 3 is written, it does a HUGE amount of calculation when trade routes have to be recalculated (like when you build a city, build a harbor, destroy a harbor, pillage a road, etc).

As for the in-between turns, well, a huge map means lots of tiles with lots of units running around and lots of cities for the game to run calculations on. Lots of civs means that it has to run those calculations over a dozen times.

It comes to a point where it doesn't really matter what computer you have -- there's so much to calculate that it takes the computer a long time.

My Civ computer was built in 2003, and when I play some of the WW II scenarios from the mod forum, it can take half an hour between turns. You get used to it -- it's easy enough to keep a browser running and alt-tab to it and read something for a while during the IBTs (except in SGs -- then I have to watch to report IBT battles).

 

[Chieftess]

There are several things you can do to speed things up. You can go into Preferences (I forget if it's CTRL-O or CTRL-P for the last expansion) and disable anything mentioning "Animate" or "Show ... Moves" (although, I do have animate and show enemy moves clicked). Also, there's a trick that speeds up the in-between turns -

Activate a unit, and press shift-enter, and continue to hold the shift button. For some reason, this speeds things up, especially with regards to movement. I think it's part of the game engine, since not only does it work in Civ4, I've noticed it in a couple of other games.

 

[Elephantium]

@Chieftess: LOL, I didn't even stop to consider that he might have left "Animate..." and "Show..." on.

I've never used the shift-enter trick, but I have noticed that holding down the shift key while unit moves are being animated will speed up/skip the animation. It's gotten me in trouble with Sticky Keys (vile feature) on several occasions.

 

[unveiler]

Thank you Elephantium and Cheiftess! The truth is preferable to thinking I am missing out on something. Enjoy.

 

[Moosezilla]

Try caps lock so you don't have to hold shift down. Remember to take it off at first city's build.

 

[GamezRule]

Caps lock doesn't do it, and I think Sticky Keys can be turned off.

 

[Brainiac18]

There's rumor that it depends on CPU u have, and it's L2 cache which is important factor here (heads up for Intel processors). Also, I guess, Civ3 will use only one core from multiple cores you have, so maybe having powerful two core (considering that in nova days there's no chance of finding decent single) CPU is a wise thing, if you want to improve your Civ3 time between turns. There's a topic by me "Best PC config", if only you guys who could write there something could do that, it'll be helpful!