Insanely Long Load Times and Turn Ends

[analein]

Oh my God!

When I try to load a game of CIV 4, it takes about five minutes for the game to completely load. If I try and load a game while another game is already up on the screen (i.e. - I'm not loading after initially starting the game from the desktop), it takes about five minutes, THEN the entire screen turns white and the map (the whole map, mind you, not just the part I've explored) starts to reveal itself, line by line, for another five minutes or so. Later on in a game, I guess as more information and map detail comes into play, the time lapse between the ending of my turn and the beginning of my next turn is anywhere from one to two minutes. It's even longer if I'm discovering a new technology or completing a wonder on that next turn.

Has anybody had similar problems? Anybody know how to fix this (or at least speed things up a bit)? I am playing on a laptop - A Dell Inspiron 8200 with a 1.8 GHz processor, 512 Mb RAM and a Geforce 440 Go Graphics Card (64 MB Memory).

Help! The game seems really cool, but if I have to wait this long just to load things up or wait for my turn to come around again, I'm going to kill someone!

ESL

 

[Zydor]

This sounds like the memory problem- the game has a major memory issue - they will fix it - but meanwhile there is a very successfull User Patch that addresses this

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=146309

The clue in your case is the slow turn times - and decreased performance in late games, and the fact that you have been working ok, but with steadily decreasing performance. Check your page file is set min=max at 1500mb, maybe up to 2000mb,its a memory hungry beast,and you may be runningout of pagefile when you crash. However I reckon its highly likely to be the memory issue addressed by Harkys patch.

At present he is working on version 2 of the patch, and you will see references to that on the thread. Initially use the Version 1 at the start of the thread, if that does not work for you try the intermediate patch V2 at post 640. Its a benign patch, does not touch game code, and is easily installed / deinstalled. Scan read the last 2/3 pages of the thread and you will get the idea.

Keep your eye on the thread for a definitive release of version 2 if you still have problems with Version 1.

Obviously could be other things, and if it does not work for you come back here and we could try something else - but it sounds a classic for this fix

Regards
Zy

 

[analein]

Thanks Zy! I'll give it a try (no rhyme intended)!

ESL