How to speed up the game on Mac G3?

[ruther]

Can anyone help me speed up Civ III on my G3 350Mhz? It's painfully slow completing each turn and I want to finish the game before all my hair falls out. So, any thoughts on these options:

1. Can I adjust any preferences / display to make the game itself quicker? Or does making the memory allocation larger make any difference?

2. Are there any bits of hardware that I should upgrade (i.e. processor, graphics card??). A friend tells me that upgrading the chip to G4 may not cut the mustard as there will be a bottleneck at the mother board anyway.

3. Should I just bite the bullet and bankrupt myself buying a new dual processor G4? (and does the software even make use of dual processing?).

Any and all suggestions most welcome,
thanks

 

[herwin]

Turn off the sugar, like sounds, music, unit motion and the displays of unit activities that you're not interested in.

 

[Sid]

I wouldn't play on maps larger than 'Standard' if I were you. If you're using the 1.17g patch then OS X is OK, but I'd turn off quartz-rendering in the Civ3 preferences [hold OPION key on Launch] and see if it makes a difference (my G3/500 under OS 10.1.4. works fine). If you're using an earlier OS--9 or 8--then everything applies except the quartz-rendering. Also, under OS 9 or 8 memory allocation is important

If all else fails, take the advice of someone else in another forum who wrote about the 'advantages' of slow turn-rates. He just got up out of his chair when his turn was over and did stuff: housework; homework; whatever. I tried this when playing on a 'Huge' map and found it quite productive, not to mention less sedentary.

Good luck and let us know how you get on.

 

[Pharaohx]

Here is my experiences with a G3,

When the game was released I ran it on a G3 500 Mhz Pismo Powerbook with 512 megs of RAM under OS 10.1.x. The game was "acceptable" after the first patch was released, but I stayed away from any map larger than Standard. I also limited the opposition to 3 civilizations. Of course, this killed a whole lot of fun, but it kept the game moving at a decent pace.

When I upgraded to the 800MHz iMac, I thought, WOW now I can have all the civilizations turned on with a HUGH map! Well, needless to say, I saw some speed increase but nothing to write home about. In fact, it felt like a 3 civilization game on the G3. (Of course smaller games flew like the Dickens) Scrolling was zippier, but waiting for other civilizations to complete their turn took up to a few minutes. I've gotten into the habit of brushing my teeth between turns when it is time for bed.

As you would expect, everything flies at the start of the game, but bogs down near 500 AD as the number of cities grows exponentially.

So, a slimmed down game is playable on a G3 AND extremely playable on a G4. HOWEVER, even with an 800 MHz processor (100MHz bus) an EVERYTHING ON game really taxes the system.

So think about that before upgrading.

My tips for ANY system short of the Dual G4 1GHz PowerMac:

1. Uncheck animate battles. Especially later in the game.
2. Uncheck animate your moves. If you have good control over the game, you won't need to see these moves.
3. KILL Quartz option.
4. Learn as many keyboard short cuts as possible...amazing how that will quicken your turn.
5. Use the time between your turn and the opponents to plan your next move. I use a notepad and write little notes to myself. Before you know it, it will be your turn again and you have a nice list of things you need to do this turn. This stops small things like Scientific Research and Taxation from falling through the cracks. It also allows you to "cool off" during wartime, so you can plan strategic attacks with your head and not your heart.
6. Rest in the comfort of knowing this: I recently played it on a Dell 2 GHz P4 with a gig of RAM and guess what? It felt no faster than it does on my G4 iMac.


Hope that helps

 

[ruther]

Thanks for all your advice. I'll reduce the various graphics options as you suggest and see how that improves things.

Does this game work faster on OSX? And I've just downloaded a patch called Civ3 1.17g - will that effect speed or just fix various bugs?

If this all fails I guess it's back to housework in between moves!

 

[Sid]

Yeah, if you have the 1.17g patch, Civ3 runs better. Not sure about the comparison with 9.x. Originally, I had two installations of Civ3, one on OS X, one in Classic. After the 1.17g patch, I stopped using Classic mode.

I have 384 meg of RAM and playing HUGE maps is quite slow. At the moment I'm replaying the 'Imperialism' scenario and--as you say--lots of additional chores are being done.