How do you setup your game to not end with a 10 minutes long computer turns

[rashaverak]

Or to extend the question what hardware do you use ? I know this question was asked many times but wasn't here for a few years and wonder if there are some new tricks.

 

[darkedone02]

What custom game options settings are you using and what is your computer specs? Also what are your BUG option settings are too?

The reason I asked is because I'm having similar searching, even though my computer is quite a high-end system except for the CPU. i have a GTX 780 Ti, and a samsung EVO 500 series 500 GB SSD card as well, however that does not influence the game itself but it sure beats the load time of the game from 5 minutes to 1 minute.

Also if you look at one of the threads in this forum, if your using advance economy, i recommand turning that off as the game lags out due to the extreme processing of it, also i recommand turning your MAX_TRADE_ROUTES on your Global Defines in your XML folder of the mod to 0 so that you can eliminate it completely.

It's sad that nobody cannot and possibly will not be able to find a way to make civilization 4 to have multi-core optimizations so that I can completely almost eliminate all traces of long turns in this game... I wonder if it's ever possible to have one last patch that could actually add that right into the game, and if they don't... i just wait till the developers of the extended editions of Age of Empires 2 and Age of Mythology to ever come over to the civilization and make extended editions of the older games and integrate multi-core compatibility into the game.

 

[rashaverak]

What I want from civilization is immersion of real world. Meaning huge maps and lot of civilizations. I know if I play on small map with 2 nations it will take seconds but thats not the game I want to play.

As I said I didnt play for some time, I dont think the advance economy was an option at the times I was playing, not sure though, will test it. Nor do I know about Bug settings.

My specs are i5, dont remmember the frequency, it has 4 cores but thats useless as you said, 16gb ram, 2x6850 ati in CF, but I doubt the graphic card has much to do here. If there is not multithreading I guess the only real thing that matters is actually the frequency of the processor and some game settings, especially in case I dont want to sacrifice huge map and 32+ civs

 

[darkedone02]

What I want from civilization is immersion of real world. Meaning huge maps and lot of civilizations. I know if I play on small map with 2 nations it will take seconds but thats not the game I want to play.

As I said I didnt play for some time, I dont think the advance economy was an option at the times I was playing, not sure though, will test it. Nor do I know about Bug settings.

My specs are i5, dont remmember the frequency, it has 4 cores but thats useless as you said, 16gb ram, 2x6850 ati in CF, but I doubt the graphic card has much to do here. If there is not multithreading I guess the only real thing that matters is actually the frequency of the processor and some game settings, especially in case I dont want to sacrifice huge map and 32+ civs

I normally play on the standard maps, I start getting heavy lag during the renaissance that takes at least 1-2 minutes each. If I gone for a larger map, it will probably end up taking me more then 1-2 minutes during that time due to other massive civilizations + loads of cities + extra things attached to the system. in most games I have usually crush at least 3 civilizations, colonized the whole place and have at least 21 cities up and running.

 

[Ari Rahikkala]

I wonder if it's ever possible to have one last patch that could actually add that right into the game

Caveat: I'm a programmer, but I know very little about Civ4 internals specifically, and even less about this mod.

Things like Civ4's game rules are really really hard to parallelise. As far as trying to track data dependencies goes, you've got this big blob of game state, where every change in one part can cause any other arbitrary bit to change. Moving this unit over here completes this event which puts a building in all your cities, finishing this building in this city changes modifiers in your other cities, putting this unit in this city changes its defensive strength so that the AI has to replan and go attack somewhere else, etc....

Basically, you've got a long sequence of changes to the game state and you have to do all of them in order because you don't know whether some later change depends on some earlier one. Try to run them in parallel and you'll get at least inconsistencies and nondeterminism and, most likely, a crash since you followed a pointer to a nonsense memory location.

However! There might be some specific problems where some amount of parallelisation is possible. For instance, if the game spends a large part of its time running pathfinding, and it's done functionally (i.e. the pathfinding process itself doesn't change the state of anything, just returns a path), then it *might* be possible and worth it to implement a parallel pathfinding algorithm. Fiddly, hard to get right and stable, and possibly actually a performance loss since parallelism and synchronization has its own overhead, but maybe you could win a little bit.

Whether there's anything like that that you could usefully extract parallelism out of in Civ4, I have no idea. I've never profiled it, and humans are very bad at guessing what parts of code are actually taking the longest to run.

tl;dr: Place more hope in liquid nitrogen cooling than in parallelisation.

 

[JosEPh_II]

@Rashaverak,

I usually play Huge Map (Archipelago, or PerfectMongoose or Custom Continent, I don't care for earth type maps with preset civs). Game speed is Epic with 7-12 AI. My End of Turn (EoT) waits don't go over 1 minute until late Medieval Era.

Several Options I don't use (because they expand the number of AI during the game and cause mid-late game slow downs) are: Revolutions, Barb Civ, Vassals, And/or Start as Minors.

Other Options that cause slowdowns are: Fixed Borders, Advanced Economy, Realistic Culture Spread, Advanced Nukes, Combat Mod, and Size Matters. There maybe others but these seem to be the biggest users of EoT time that I remember of the top of my head.

Been playing and testing this Mod since it's inception so I have 4+ years of experience with it. And more from it's predecessors Rise of Mankind and then A New Dawn.

Ps Welcome back.

JosEPh

 

[Thunderbrd]

At this point the combat mod (including size matters) should not be causing great slowdowns.

And yes, the trade mechanism does cause a LOT of delay. I'll be looking into that at some point soon to investigate what can be done to get it to at least run smoother.

Actually... I think the greatest slowdown causing option is storms still.

 

[JosEPh_II]

At this point the combat mod (including size matters) should not be causing great slowdowns.

And yes, the trade mechanism does cause a LOT of delay. I'll be looking into that at some point soon to investigate what can be done to get it to at least run smoother.

Actually... I think the greatest slowdown causing option is storms still.

I personally would not cry if Storms "disappeared" for good.

JosEPh

 

[strategyonly]

At this point the combat mod (including size matters) should not be causing great slowdowns.

And yes, the trade mechanism does cause a LOT of delay. I'll be looking into that at some point soon to investigate what can be done to get it to at least run smoother.

Actually... I think the greatest slowdown causing option is storms still.

I personally would not cry if Storms "disappeared" for good.

JosEPh

I completely agree here, get rid of them, but i will leave it up to DH, what say you??

 

[fab_floyd]

i recommand turning that off as the game lags out due to the extreme processing of it, also i recommand turning your MAX_TRADE_ROUTES on your Global Defines in your XML folder of the mod to 0 so that you can eliminate it completely.

LoL, i did it, and it killed my economy

If you do that, it will erase all your trade routes, including these with your own cities.

 

[JosEPh_II]

LoL, i did it, and it killed my economy

If you do that, it will erase all your trade routes, including these with your own cities.

The trick is that you are supposed to start a new game so you are not dependent upon the TRs to start with.

If you changed it while In a game of course it killed your "economy". Free money allllll gooooone!

JosEPh

 

[Harrier]

I personally would not cry if Storms "disappeared" for good.

JosEPh

Storms are a bug option anyway. So what is the problem? - if you do not want them turn them off. Or am I missing something?

 

[JosEPh_II]

Storms are a bug option anyway. So what is the problem? - if you do not want them turn them off. Or am I missing something?

Ask T-brd why.

JosEPh

 

[Thunderbrd]

They don't cause any additional slowdown if they aren't ON in the bug options so there's no reason to remove them entirely imo. Just sayin' if they ARE on then you're going to have a slowdown that's noticeable.

 

[strategyonly]

They don't cause any additional slowdown if they aren't ON in the bug options so there's no reason to remove them entirely imo. Just sayin' if they ARE on then you're going to have a slowdown that's noticeable.

But even if you check NO Storms, you will still get storms, thats how it is set up.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

But even if you check NO Storms, you will still get storms, thats how it is set up.

You don't get storms. You may get storm events which sink your ships or damage cities but you don't get the storm feature on the map. It is the storm feature on the map that causes slow downs, mostly because they affect the paths of ships.

 

[Nimek]

So please remove storms before official release. Storms are not worth turn times delays.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

So please remove storms before official release. Storms are not worth turn times delays.

Just turn them off. They are off by default.

 

[Stormwind]

And the storms that are there after map creation will disperse long before any ships are being built.

 

[platyping]

Might as well just review the codes involved.
There are ways to spawn storms with minimal effort.