How strong comp needs to be?

[Kime11]

for playing on huge map with 16 civ??? (Ghz,RAM)

I've played PTW and it was pretty slow,comparing with main game where he was very quick (in PTW it takes about 10s between turns,and in main game not more than ,say,5 sec...),I don't get it,way?

I have 1.7 Ghz,256 MB RAM

 

[LOVE_Magiska]

Heh, I'm playing a Conquests 312 x 312 map using my lowly Athlon 1800 XP with 512 megs RAM. Let's hope it doesn't fry

 

[Ilendil]

The length in between turns is how long it takes for the AI to move their units, manage their cities, discuss negotiations between each other and many other things.
If you play on a Huge map with 16 civs but on a low difficulty you will experience almost no lag, but if you set it on a much higher difficulty like Emperor, where they receive many, many bonuses, they will be able to produce lots of units, making the turns seem like forever.

 

[Chieftess]

The length between turns also increases (a lot!!!) when civs are at war with each other.

 

[bluebox]

i had the impression ptw is the slowest civ3 release. my (unconfirmed) explanation for that is, that ptw runs on the original civ3 engine and just got more to do in terms of ai calculation and such. c3c is as fast as civ3 again, maybe even faster. for this indicates c3c brought more changes than screwing up corruption it's pretty quick due to better code.
conclusion: huge maps are probably better played either on civ3 or conquests.

 

[LordKestrel]

I'm playing my first huge/max game, and half way through the Middle Ages, it's starting to take 20 seconds per turn. This is on an AthlonXP 3200+ with 1 gig of ram, so a slower box will take longer. I'm scared to see what the Industrial Age will look like.

 

[Xerol]

I did a "standard" Huge Map (160x160) on my now deceased 233 Mhz laptop with a measly 128 of ram, with 15 rivals. The turn-wait was horrendous, but it still ran. I usually played a turn in between classes during the modern age, then plugged it into a convienient outlet during the next period.

 

[skyline5k]

I'm playing the Teturkhan scenario, with 31, and it's taking FOREVER (5-6 minutes) between turns. This normally wouldn't be important, but I'm impatient.

I'm running around 300 ram, and 1.8gig hard drive.

 

[binyo66]

Originally posted by Chieftess
The length between turns also increases (a lot!!!) when civs are at war with each other.

True. Basically the road, harbor, airport are the one which take times a lot. From City A to City B, computer have to calculate the road for sending luxuries, resources. When AI at war on modern time, where razing, pillaging are common, for every change of them (how many roads are there on the map? ), the computer need to recalculate again. That is why u find in C3C in Huge with 30+ civs may take 45 minutes lag

 

[Xerol]

Play it on a slow PC. Just to get used to extremely long turn waits. Have some activity available to do while the AIs do their stuff. A book to read, paper to write on, an instrument to play, people to entertain, or just alt-tab to CFC.

I've also found that having Winamp playing doesn't have too much of a detrimental effect on the turn wait, as a lot of what it's doing is just processing things "silently" but it also gets a fixed block of CPU time, something that closing other apps doesn't help with, since it still gets the same amount(or just about) of processor.

 

[scl004]

I'd just like to get some pitty while I'm here. My current rig:

Pentium III 600mhz
128 ram
Voodoo 3 graphix card

ouch! These turns take forever. I ALWAYS have something going on in the background so the wait between turns isn't killer (TV or something good on the stereo).

Wait times between turns are between 5 and 10 minutes.

ScL

 

[Romanus]

scl004
Similar PC here, but I have a Geforce2 and 256ram

Very long wait times between turns on big maps...I usually use small and tiny maps......just cant handle the wait

 

[Lord Parkin]

Same here, a lot of the reason I prefer smaller maps is that the wait on huge ones gets so irritating and depressing.

 

[smallmoskito]

powering with a PII 350Mhz, which is under the recommended 400Mhz requirement, I've never attempted to go larger than standard map size... and well, it does really take a while between turns.... and sometimes, clicking on those popup dialogs asking for permission to see me doesn't response...

need a better comp...

 

[Lord Parkin]

Ouch, only a Pentium2? I'm on a Pentium4 and I thought it was slow!!

 

[Keaka26]

what is more useful in speeding up the wait time...more ram or more processing power (cpu)?

To some effect, if more ram is the answer, you could perhaps increase your virtual memory size. And yes, I realize that virtual memory (swap file) is thousands of time slower than real ram.

 

[alamo]

I have a 1.3GHz but I still disable a bunch of the animations and frequently hold the shift key to temporarily disable animations.

I hope you are doing some of the same.

 

[DS_Legionary]

Yea the wait can be very drastic on huge maps and bigger. I find there are two ways to alleviate this problem. First is to buy a better computer, which is always nice, but not everyone can afford one. The other option is to eliminate several AI in the early stages of the game. This has two effects for the player. One being slower wait times, the other being more turn for you. This is what I used to do on my old Pentium 2. Thankfully now I've got a Pentium 4 so it's not as bad as it was.

 

[binyo66]

what is more useful in speeding up the wait time...more ram or more processing power (cpu)?

To some effect, if more ram is the answer, you could perhaps increase your virtual memory size. And yes, I realize that virtual memory (swap file) is thousands of time slower than real ram.

I would says :
For C3C, for any CPU u need at least 512M. After that increase CPU would be good. Consider u have pentium 6 , but memory only 64M (it would be swapped too often). IMO, the problem is laid on HD speed where the swapping occured (to avoid too much swap, u need to increase RAM),
can u imagine if HD is as fast as memory (or half) ?
Edit : On the other hand, assuming u have P133 (Pentium 1) with 4GB memory. CivIII may not run since some code (program wise) may not available on P1