Helping with slowdowns

[DarkxL0rd]

I have been enjoying my games recently because I have started roleplaying the different civs how I think would be played, but after I get to turn 400 or so(normal speed) the slowdown has been unbearable, such that I have been reading novels in between turns, which last about 5-6 minutes apiece. I play standard size maps with 3 continents, and by this time in the game there are usually 6-8 civs left in play. To make matter worse, if anything weird happens, like a Tree ent defender or I complete the Rites of Oghma or Genesis, the game just freezes completely. I'm playing on high graphic settings, does that change anything? I'm running a 2 Gig processor with 3.25 Gigs of RAM and a Nvidia Geforce 9600 GT video card. any suggestions on ways to speed up the game turns?

 

[Sephi]

Sounds like something odd is going on. I recently made some speed debugging in Wildmana and in the endgame a turn on a large map takes about 15 seconds with more than 1000 units around. Even on a very huge map with about 20 civs and 2800+units turntime is still less than a minute (about 75% is AI unit orders, 20% AI city orders and 5% the rest). My CPU is 2.66 GHz and 2GB ram.

Wildmana should run faster than FFH and my CPU is a good deal faster, but I am still surprised on the difference. How does the map look like when you have the slowdown. All unsettled land gone? Maybe a specific civ that causes trouble?

slowdown at Genesis ritual is normal I think as the game isn't optimized for things like this.

 

[DarkxL0rd]

my last 2 games, the few civs left were the sheim, one of the dwarves, the calabim and malakim, and the clan. everything is settled with everyone having 7-15 cities apiece. if the sheim ever went to war with the calabim I'd have to go into the world builder and peace them apart or the next turn it would freeze. needless to say when i made it to that continent they had 600+ stacks waiting for me.

 

[CurseUppl]

Something is definitely wrong with a PC like that. One step is putting all graphic settings on low.

Another... well, with such a bad slowdown (I don't get that kind of slow down and my PC is from 2003, and that's playing a huge map with 18 civs for 5-600 turns) there might be something wrong with the PC itself. Suggest you reformat it and/or install Windows 7.

 

[CitizenSnips]

This is one of the reasons I like playing on lower levels. Stacks are never bigger than 10-15, if that.

 

[Tlalynet]

There have been several people commenting that the time between turns has increased under K-M, I know its pretty early in the game that I have to wait 3-5 seconds between turns (thats a long time too me, and it really adds up)

I haven't had the slowdowns you describe on standard maps, though I'm a little more aggressive and usually live in a violent enough world that stacks like you describe don't build up so badly.

It does sound like something odd is going on all the same. Got a savegame for us to look at?

 

[DarkxL0rd]

man... everytime someone asks me for a save game it is when i have just got fed up with a game and started a fresh game(saving over the problem game) I'll play this out and post when things start slowing down. I'll tone down the graphics too.

 

[Emptiness]

Your problem might not be FfH2/Civ; all of the normal reasons for poor computer performance apply as well. Check for malware, defrag your hard drives, disable any unnecessary TSRs, exit any other programs that might be running in the background, update to the latest NVidia drivers, and so on. Also remember that there is more to computer performance than processor speed and ram count. Unless you are looking to find and replace the source of a hardware performance bottleneck, your best bet is to just adjust the size of the map and the number of civs until you get the kind of turn speeds you want.

 

[schlalex]

This very reason is why i always stop playing FFH after a while.
My computer is 2 years old, but still a decent machine.
Its always the same.
I start a game and enjoy it, because the mod ist just fantastic.
But in the end of midgame, the turntime starts to become really annoying.
1+Minute and thats just too much for me to have fun.
And i even went back to Standard Size maps!
Ok, i always play Deity, but hey, its only Civ so thats really frustrating.
Vanilla runs much faster, so it is definitely an issue of FFH.
I hoped that the team included all the speed tweaks of Wildmana in the time i didnt play.
But unfortunately, nothing has changed.
So the only chance might be to play Wildmana.
But sorry Sephi, i tried it and i like some of your ideas. But Wildmana has far too many things i dont want.
As an example the Bugmod. I dont like it in Vanilla and in FFH i think it is even worse.
All the menus and stuff plus its not really well implented. No thanks.
So i think, all the work of the team should be spent in developing the AI and make the game running faster.
I think the game is so slow, because the dumb AI just moves all of their Units every turn. Is it really so difficult to teach the AI, to place their SoDs in BorderCities and leave it untouched until War begins?

 

[Sephi]

I haven't played base FFH in a while so I can't comment on the current performance, but in general it is coded to run fast and it seems that it runs fast enough for most. The AI problem you described doesn't exist for example.

So the only chance might be to play Wildmana.
But sorry Sephi, i tried it and i like some of your ideas. But Wildmana has far too many things i dont want.

well most of the new content can be disabled. But I get your point. Expecting the FFH team to merge this or that is a bit much though, trust me you are not the only one who would want to see something being merged into FFH

 

[DarkxL0rd]

ok, so i messed with the priority of the process and that didnt change anything, i changed the resolutions and that didnt help. i went into my system properties of my computer and had it focus on performance and that helped a little bit, but still like 30 sec turn times and i'm on turn 285 or so. here is a save game

 

[Tlalynet]

Yep, its slow on my PC too, much slower than I've seen in my own games even later in the game.

Its a standard map with extra civs (not the play now default) and a map that creates slightly more land than usual isn't it? The only thing I can think of is its the extra civs (even the ones with one city) stockpiling units.

I'm wrong, I unceremoniously WBed the rest of the world out of existence continent by continent and it still takes a long time to pass turns, I wonder what it could be.

Killing everything but one AI city reduces the turn delay to under 10 seconds, its still too long though.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

did you guys enable python exceptions? that might help figuring out the issue

 

[Sephi]

for me the save game is also much too slow.

 

[DarkxL0rd]

do you think i am putting too many civs on a standard map? i usually play 13 plus me, but they die off fairly quickly. I have played every map type but have found that i like 2-3 continents. it's like tournament-style. you gotta win your bracket before heading off to the winners of the other continents, who have usually war'd enough that they don't have too big of stacks waiting.

 

[Tlalynet]

I thought that, but even after deleting all but 3 civs it was still slow. I had to take them down to one city to get it to run reasonably fast, and even then it was a 10 second delay. I might take another look at it tomorrow see if I can contribute anything else.

I love your map setup by the way, its usually how I play vannila civ, but I stoped playing multicontinental FFH under J because the AI didn't get it, I should try again now.

I tried removing and editing a few different things today to no success, is there a definite point the game slows down or does it just gradually get slower?

 

[DarkxL0rd]

it just gradually gets slower and then one turn just stops all together

 

[razzle]

There have been several people commenting that the time between turns has increased under K-M, I know its pretty early in the game that I have to wait 3-5 seconds between turns (thats a long time too me, and it really adds up)

I haven't had the slowdowns you describe on standard maps, though I'm a little more aggressive and usually live in a violent enough world that stacks like you describe don't build up so badly.

It does sound like something odd is going on all the same. Got a savegame for us to look at?

I have had exactly that experience. This upgrading to the M-patch (from the J-patch) the CPU's thinkingtime between turns started taking aprox. 5 times longer. When I get to around turn 300 on a huge map with 11 civs, my average in between turn time is 3 minutes, whereas before the patch upgrade, it never took more than 30 seconds.

Can anything be done? Apart from buying a new computer ;-) I have a save game from around turn 300, if it helps.

Razzle

 

[Emptiness]

Try playing on smaller maps with fewer civs.

 

[CitizenSnips]

Oh my goodness. If a turn starts taking 30 seconds I decide the game has become too bloated and start a new one.