Do I need a new computer?

[AgentTBC]

My computer is state of the art. State of the art for 4 years ago, when I bought it. I used to upgrade about every 2 years but I haven't felt the need to upgrade since nothing has really stressed the system to the breaking point; Crysis is about as problematic a game I've encountered and even that played pretty well at moderate settings.

But I'm getting extreme slowdowns in FFH2 on medium-sized maps in the late-mid and late games. What turn this starts happening on depends heavily on how aggressive I'm playing. If I'm an aggressive civ and eliminate a couple people and keep the others from expanding to huge sizes I can play pretty much the whole game. But if I don't expand rapidly myself and a couple other civs get big, by turn 300 (medium sized map, normal speed) it can take a couple minutes from when I hit end turn to when it's my turn again. Given my turn might take as little as 15 seconds, that's not a good ratio of playing time to sitting around waiting twiddling my thumbs.

Is this something a new computer will fix and I need to upgrade? Or is it intrinsic to the game. I never had much problem with BTS even on map sizes bigger than medium. I assume the mod must be more intensive with extra code and such but I dunno if thats true for sure.

It's probably about that time anyway, although I might go for a gaming laptop instead of a desktop since, unfortunately, it seems most games are heading to consoles and I have a 360.

 

[civ_king]

My computer is state of the art. State of the art for 4 years ago, when I bought it. I used to upgrade about every 2 years but I haven't felt the need to upgrade since nothing has really stressed the system to the breaking point; Crysis is about as problematic a game I've encountered and even that played pretty well at moderate settings.

But I'm getting extreme slowdowns in FFH2 on medium-sized maps in the late-mid and late games. What turn this starts happening on depends heavily on how aggressive I'm playing. If I'm an aggressive civ and eliminate a couple people and keep the others from expanding to huge sizes I can play pretty much the whole game. But if I don't expand rapidly myself and a couple other civs get big, by turn 300 (medium sized map, normal speed) it can take a couple minutes from when I hit end turn to when it's my turn again. Given my turn might take as little as 15 seconds, that's not a good ratio of playing time to sitting around waiting twiddling my thumbs.

Is this something a new computer will fix and I need to upgrade? Or is it intrinsic to the game. I never had much problem with BTS even on map sizes bigger than medium. I assume the mod must be more intensive with extra code and such but I dunno if thats true for sure.

It's probably about that time anyway, although I might go for a gaming laptop instead of a desktop since, unfortunately, it seems most games are heading to consoles and I have a 360.

how many kilobytes are your save files?

 

[Honor]

There's nothing you can do about it as far as I know AgentTBC. It's just the nature of things here in the FfH realm.

(Although I heard getting more RAM could help a bit)

 

[Sephi]

Is this something a new computer will fix and I need to upgrade?

most likely no

Or is it intrinsic to the game.

definetly no

I never had much problem with BTS even on map sizes bigger than medium. I assume the mod must be more intensive with extra code and such but I dunno if thats true for sure.

That's not the problem at all. It really depends on how much the mod breaks the normal BTS functions. If some units have wrong UNITAI or the dll isn't modified for some special characteristics of those units, they can cause huge performance hits. I did rewrote the AI_update function for some barbarian units and a turn on a huge map with 600+ units of them would take less than 10 seconds (in a FF modmod).

 

[AgentTBC]

civ_king: A quick check shows the save files for my last game coming in around a megabyte. Oddly, the game before that was slower and those saves are only around 600k. But I had 60% of the pop and 50% of the land on that one.

Sephi: Maybe if you have a free month or something you could optimize some of the code

 

[Honor]

That's not the problem at all. It really depends on how much the mod breaks the normal BTS functions. If some units have wrong UNITAI or the dll isn't modified for some special characteristics of those units, they can cause huge performance hits. I did rewrote the AI_update function for some barbarian units and a turn on a huge map with 600+ units of them would take less than 10 seconds (in a FF modmod).

That is really, really, REALLY cool. That means it is not intrinsic! I always thought the performance issue were unavoidable.

 

[Sephi]

Agent, do you have performance problems with base FFH or Orbis modmod?

 

[rokel]

Just to jump in here, I downloaded Orbis today and tested on both large and huge maps (what I normally play on), using creation, mountain coast, and erebus. From the first turn I noticed turns are a lot slower then in FFH or Far Further.

I downloaded the client and then applied the patch, I'm hoping someone can help me with a fix since this performance issue seems to only apply to Orbis and I'd really like to play it.

 

[Opera]

I know that Barbarian World slow me down, did you use that option?
Also, there is some canBuild() callbacks that are making it slow. Normally, on standard size, it goes relatively well

 

[Wauthan]

Yeah it's sort of part of the game I'm afraid. FFH is slower then vanilla BtS. And my experience is that Orbis starts out slower than FF. But unlike FF Orbis doesn't get all that much worse as the game proceeds. Much of the slowdowns I experience is due to barbarian units spawning, though removing a lot of the fog of war (through passive spying for example) also puts a strain on things.

Thank the powers that they changed the burning deserts animation. Before that I had to remove every large patch of desert before starting the game.

 

[Opera]

I never got to see those burning sands sadly...
Also, Orbis isn't that slow at the start of a game for me. Among other things, two options that slows it down for me are End of Winter and Barbarian World.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

yeah, but those 2 should only have an effect at game start, not into the endgame which is where the real trouble lies. the number of AI units present in the game seems to be the most impact-heavy. Sephi's optimizations in Wild Mana should be a good relief for that.

 

[rokel]

Thanks for the advice guys, I'm going to make sure winter and barb word is turned off, and might as well throw in 'final five' just to cut down on the AI.
I'll try a large pangea as well, see what happens!

 

[rokel]

Update, uninstalled blue marble and playing on huge/pangea without Barb world etc and it runs good enough to play.

One thing though, doing final 5 it counts up from around 7000 and when it it gets to turn 50 on 7050 no one gets ganked.

 

[blade117]

Are there only 5 people left?

 

[Lord Alvon]

One thing though, doing final 5 it counts up from around 7000 and when it it gets to turn 50 on 7050 no one gets ganked.

I usually use final five for my games - I usually do well in the beginning and then fall back a bit in the end - but with the starting at 7000 and going up...it's kind of dumb. Takes all the fun out of trying to be better than everyone else every 50 turns. They should really fix that.
And as for the computer thing - I usually have huge maps, and I have a brand new computer - and instead of taking a long time between turns, what does it do? @ around turn 300, right on schedule, I get my first crash. I usually abandon the game after that... I usually use FF v050, so that might make a difference.


-A. Alvon

 

[Lord Alvon]

Something I also noticed was that the game crashed earlier and more often when Hyborem came in - most likely because of all the burning sands animations. I'm glad they changed that in Orbis...

 

[sluggish_homer]

this mod running very slow during turn changing. i don't have this problem when playing ffh2. any suggestions?

 

[zup]

Quite simply, Orbis is much more work for your pc than FFH2. Though it is small compared to mods like RoM. (I reliably get MAF in RoM as soon as I found my capital.) But here are some suggestions.

Use a smaller world size. Even standard maps are enormous, generally too big for me to pursue conquest, unless I go for the capitulation route. Small too will give you nice worlds, and those are more beatable too. Just add more AIs to make it more interesting, although increasing AIs will lower performance. But the default number of AIs seems low to me. Send expeditions to weed out barbarians in the wilderness and settle rapidly and expansively to reduce the number of units the game has to render and keep track of. End of winter seems to be a resource hog game option, as is barbarian world, for obvious reasons (more units and cities in the map early). Lower graphics settings, don't run other software at the same time, defragmenting of your hard drive can improve performance slightly or even significantly. Reduce the amount of memory Windows hogs. I guess you could dedicate one core for Civ4 alone if you have dual- or multi-core cpu and let the others run Windows and whatever else you have open. I have no idea how this could be accomplished though.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

you could try AlacrityPC, that one allows you to specify which core to run it on and how dedicated the core will be to BTS. setting it to run BTS on one core, Real Time priority, so that you have a whole core dedicated to running the OS should run fine ( dual-core, BTS can't run on more than 1 core anyway )