... it surely has to be the speed of the game.
Having now played the game since it was released, I can live with the smaller idiosyncricies of the rules and am enjoying the game immensely.
But the current game I'm playing (which has absorbed the last 10 days for me) has just about become umplayable. I'm using Marla's World Map, with 15 civs and the complexities are exactly what I was looking for. But now I'm approaching modern times, and most of the world is populated and the game play has slowed tremendously (currently something like 20 minutes + per turn).
Due to the way the program runs, its not even a case of making your moves and waiting 20 mins, since the AI will often require me to respond depending on its actions (e.g. it captures one of my cities, or a foreign civ want to speak to me). There are even significant delays during my turn depending on what I'm doing (settling a new city being an obvious example).
Its highly frustrating since I'm running a pretty speedy machine (1.6Ghz P4, 512Ram, 32Mb Video card, Windows XP).
I've even tried monitoring the system performance during the long pauses, and all I can say is that it's not memory thrashing (memory usage rarely gets above 280Mb) - its purely CPU - 100% constantly.
As many people have already pointed out, it seems that its the calculations in connection with changing cultural boundaries and their impact on cities (e.g. checking for culture based flipping) that is where all the processing effort is going. My suspicion is that the program is recalculating the impact on the whole world for every small change (even a change in population in one city).
When you compound that by having a large territory, with multiple neighbours, and the odd war or two - it accounts for the huge delays.
So what's the answer Firaxis? Is there really no way that these algoritms can be improved? Does the program really need to recalculate to such depth so often?
Sure I could play on smaller maps or with less civs - and I probably will have to do so to regain my enthusiasm for the game. But clearly the game has a major problem with the level of computation required - and I can't believe it runs significantly faster on anyone else's PC.
Please let's be sure that this single issue gets maximum attention before we get side-tracked on all the small stuff.
Having now played the game since it was released, I can live with the smaller idiosyncricies of the rules and am enjoying the game immensely.
But the current game I'm playing (which has absorbed the last 10 days for me) has just about become umplayable. I'm using Marla's World Map, with 15 civs and the complexities are exactly what I was looking for. But now I'm approaching modern times, and most of the world is populated and the game play has slowed tremendously (currently something like 20 minutes + per turn).
Due to the way the program runs, its not even a case of making your moves and waiting 20 mins, since the AI will often require me to respond depending on its actions (e.g. it captures one of my cities, or a foreign civ want to speak to me). There are even significant delays during my turn depending on what I'm doing (settling a new city being an obvious example).
Its highly frustrating since I'm running a pretty speedy machine (1.6Ghz P4, 512Ram, 32Mb Video card, Windows XP).
I've even tried monitoring the system performance during the long pauses, and all I can say is that it's not memory thrashing (memory usage rarely gets above 280Mb) - its purely CPU - 100% constantly.
As many people have already pointed out, it seems that its the calculations in connection with changing cultural boundaries and their impact on cities (e.g. checking for culture based flipping) that is where all the processing effort is going. My suspicion is that the program is recalculating the impact on the whole world for every small change (even a change in population in one city).
When you compound that by having a large territory, with multiple neighbours, and the odd war or two - it accounts for the huge delays.
So what's the answer Firaxis? Is there really no way that these algoritms can be improved? Does the program really need to recalculate to such depth so often?
Sure I could play on smaller maps or with less civs - and I probably will have to do so to regain my enthusiasm for the game. But clearly the game has a major problem with the level of computation required - and I can't believe it runs significantly faster on anyone else's PC.
Please let's be sure that this single issue gets maximum attention before we get side-tracked on all the small stuff.
