How I accidentally solved my CIV5 loading times

[Captain Action]

Ever since CIV5 first came out I've been cursed with hour+ long loading times for my saved games. Neither loading the quick save or loading from the main menu made any difference. Oddly enough, I could make a new game in just a few minutes. Any Size and number of city states and AI players and to make matters worse, whenever I pulled up taskmanager to see if something was locking up my system all I would see is CIV5 ( not responding) and my system idling at 97%.

Because of this, I recently took up the habit of playing other games while waiting for CIV5 to load. In particular, DOTA2. Since the average game with hard AI takes 30-60 minutes, I could play a game or two of DOTA2 until my system begins to choke as it finishes loading the CIV5 game I had been waiting an hour or so for.

It was during a war in which I sent one my best unit to their deaths due to me fat fingering the keys that I discovered something unexpected. I reloaded my quick save and then started DOTA 2 up again. But, before I could start a new game my system began to choke again. Wondering WTF was going on I alt-tab back to my CIV5 game and it was reloaded! I quickly found that my CIV5 game would quickly reload even if I dropped back to the main screen selected a different save to load.

Hopeful this helps somebody. Although I am wondering about how DOTA2 can fix my hour long reload times. I am running XP and my drivers, direct x, and service pack are all up to date.

 

[Mutineer]

My computer pretty old, but loading game never take too long. I believe at average starting game take longer then loading, so I believe it is something about your system.

 

[Mutineer]

after thinking a bit i come to conclusion that you probably have disc space problem, as your system does not allocate enogth virtual memory. Check how mach free space you have on your system drive and how mach virtual memory allocated.

It does look to me like your system spend all time swapping page files.