Multiplayer game slows down over time

[Roman Caesar]

When playing on a small map (duel) across a LAN (100Mbps) with only two human players, the game starts out very smooth and the movement of troops is fluent. However, over the duration of the game, the following types of actions take noticeably longer:
- Opening city screens, allocating resources
- Selecting troops, moving troops
- Toggling between cities

This behaviour is experienced in the single game as well (but not to the same degree) and I was wondering if others have experienced this slowdown, especially in a multiplayer session. Does anyone have any suggestions to improve the fluency?

 

[PieceOfMind]

Yes I experience this problem and it is quite annoying. I've just gotten used to it now.

I don't think there's a lot you can do about it. I get the impression it's mostly the efficiency of the code. In BtS it was supposed to be fixed so there were fewer python calls (I think these are the main reason for slow down) but I haven't noticed any real improvement over warlords or vanilla. I assume you've tried the obvious things like minimising graphics settings and avoiding running applications in the background.

To run quickly I think Civ4 needs a beast of a computer.

 

[winux]

Well ive been civ4 for a while, and in my opinion this is normal and it mostly happen in slower computer specially with very low memory installed.

I know this happens because i wrote variaties of games and encountered problems in different situations.

As the game progresses, the number of cities contributes to the consumption of the memory, same with all the other variables in the game like, city improvements, units, technologies, and terrain revealed in the map, and so.
The slowing down even multiply to the number of players who joined the game regardless of the computer specifications and bug fixes in the program.

Since we dont have any control of the bugs in the program, i suggest guys that you add more internal memory in your computers in parallel with the other players or else you have to wait for too long for others turn.

i hope these helps explain things


Winux
winuxworx@yahoo.com

 

[LDeska]

I don't think that more memory will help - I had 512MB in my comp and I put one more 512MB to use dual channel feature and speed up civ4 a bit (vanilla version, it was more than year ago). It didn't helped even a bit. My laptop has 2GB RAM and it also doesn't help.
I think that it depends on your processor and graphic card - civ4 has inefficient code inside... (memory leaks that were found by civ fans for example).
Let's hope that BtS will be better, but for now I haven't noticed any improvement.

 

[Ariminio]

I have a computer beast and it still happens, what you can do is restart the computer every 2 hours or so, it helps for a short while...