Low-poly, stripped-down version?

[Gadren]

I've really enjoying Civ IV, but the slowdown is somewhat aggravating... I bet some of this will be alleviated by a future patch, but it got me thinking...

I remember seeing a terrain mod for Civ III a while back that made the terrain into its bare essentials, with plain colors for each terrain type. The author made this because he didn't care about the bells and whistles and just wanted pure gameplay.

At the time, I thought, "Why would someone not want the nice graphics?" But with Civ IV, I'm thinking that a lot of the 3D effects and such are just not adding anything for me. I'm wondering whether or not it would be feasible for there to be made a mod with simpler textures, and, more importantly, simpler 3D meshes, like a simple pyramid for a mountain, and flat tiles for most squares. Would this kind of thing make it run faster? Or what about removing transparency for some of the meus?

And the units as well -- could they be reduced to 2D images to make them less laggy?

Civ IV looks great, but when I hit the 1700's and have to wait several minutes for a tech screen to pop up, it sadly makes me more reluctant to get into the game.

So, can anyone here with more expertise than I have tell me if such changes could make it run better?

 

[EdCase]

Less polys (actually really should refer to triangles) on screen should in theory make the graphical aspects smoother..scrolling zooming etc...but doubtful if it would affect gamespeed as far as turn processing.
Basically because these are not graphics functions but processor..calculation functions

 

[Leonel]

I would welcome a low poly version greatly. Of course there would be the time in which the computer processes the computer AI's moves, but the more terrain improvements that come, the slower the gameplay gets.

 

[PointlesS]

I don't think the problem with the game is polygons...the characters look like a few hundreds polys and the cities and improvements aren't (or shouldn't be) thousands of polygons...the terrain on the other hand looks so smooth it's tough to throw out a number but it can't be too much I'd imagine...compare this to a standard fps game like unreal tournament 2004 where the average scene at a given point in the level is 70,00-150,000 or more polygons and runs fine...

I run the game at 1024x768 2xaa on an athlon xp 3200+...1gb of ram and a geforce 6800le...not really a powerhouse but it runs the game fine...

 

[The Great Apple]

While I don't have the game, so haven't had a detailed look at the characters I'm not sure, but the untis could very easily be in the thousands. It's amazing how fast those things can add up, especially in anything with curves.

Now with 3 on each square, and lets say you can see 10 units, we're getting into quite large numbers - not including the terrain and cities.

 

[EdCase]

I would welcome a low poly version greatly. Of course there would be the time in which the computer processes the computer AI's moves, but the more terrain improvements that come, the slower the gameplay gets.

I would attribute the slowing more towards a memory leak than "polygons" at this point.....

 

[MrThing]

I do find that the game really slowys down after I begin map trading but is not bad prior to that point.