Civ3 Complete 100% CPU Usage

[npiamaio]

Help!,
I just bought Civ3 Complete. I run the game and my cpu is pegged at 100% all the time! This happens no matter what state the game is in. It causes my laptop to overheat and consume large amounts of power. This makes the game virtually unplayable on my laptop. It performs the same on my desktop! Why does this game consume this much CPU? This is astounding. This is a low tech game. Running XP on laptop and Win2k on desktop.

Is there a patch for this? Will there be a fix?

How do I contact firaxis tech support? I've been to the civ3 website (fruitless) and the firaxis site and is seems as if they have hidden the tech support link.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

 

[Ginger_Ale]

www.atari.com would be Civ3's tech support.

What are your system specs?

 

[vmxa]

Well for most of the game and at most settings of the map it will use little power and it will not take long.

For large and huge maps and those with lots of water and massive wars late in the game or on Sid, you can expect it to run 100% for as long 30 minutes on even a 3G processor.

It does not require a lot of memory, but it is cpu intensive. It has to do a lot of trade route checking and is you have say 24 civs with lots of cities and harbors, then it will be busy.

What is the processor you are using?

 

[I_batman]

Well for most of the game and at most settings of the map it will use little power and it will not take long.

For large and huge maps and those with lots of water and massive wars late in the game or on Sid, you can expect it to run 100% for as long 30 minutes on even a 3G processor.

It does not require a lot of memory, but it is cpu intensive. It has to do a lot of trade route checking and is you have say 24 civs with lots of cities and harbors, then it will be busy.

What is the processor you are using?

This is due to how the coding was designed in Civ III. They won't be changing this with Civ IV coming out now. There is no way to really fix this, outside of changing it within the editor to disallow trading, and that can wreck your game play.
Even then, with trading off, you will likely run at 100 percent.

 

[npiamaio]

This is due to how the coding was designed in Civ III. They won't be changing this with Civ IV coming out now. There is no way to really fix this, outside of changing it within the editor to disallow trading, and that can wreck your game play.
Even then, with trading off, you will likely run at 100 percent.

Your explanation seems plausible. This is unacceptable! It would run your CPU at 100% no matter what processor you had, consuming as much resources as provided. That is a terrible coding scheme.

The threads should only execute, consuming the processor when there is a job to do. That sounds rather basic and fundamental. For a fix perhaps, all the threads should have a small sleep in their loop to yield the processor. Maybe the length of sleep could be a function of number of cities in a particular game.

I think this is terrible though. Civ3 games last a long time. This means the CPU is pegged for hours on end! That is not good, not to mention the wasted electricity consumed.

Concerned Civ3 fan

 

[Padma]

FWIW, Civ3 was built on SMAC code, which was built on Civ2 code, which was built on Civ1 code. It has been patched and repatched so may times it is actually rather fragile - you never really know what effects a new patch might have, to things that it should have no business affecting. Many basic routines were actually writen by interns, and are therefore very inefficient.

For all these reasons (and more) Civ4 was re-written from scratch, and should be much improved in this area.

In any case, there will be no more patches for Civ3. Period. What has been done is all that will be done.