Patched and Slow

[wolfsforza]

I recently reinstalled Civ3 for a summer of Civving and ot the 1.21 patch. But when I started playing the game was absurdly slow. Does anyone know if this is related to the patch and if so how it can be remedied?

Anyone know some other ways to speed up the game during the "Please wait..." while it cycles the other turns? It's gotten to where I can't play it cause it's so boring while I wait. I've got a 700 MHz with 512 Ram so I know it's not my system.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Pliny The Elder]

Turn off any apps you have running in the background. I have a 1.33, and 512 mb ram, and it runs fine, on mine.

 

[D9phoenix]

You can turn off auto save under prefrences, that will speed up the end turns alittle bit. As for your system specs, they will be fine as long as you don't play large maps with alot of civ's.

Even my p4 can take 15 minutes plus on huge maps.

 

[murewa]

wolf:
i have a 700Hz and 128 MB Ram (a quarter of yours) and it runs fine. even with apps running in the background (kazaa, MSword - gamelogs, acrobat reader - manual, even Powerpoint). those background apps don't even dent game performance whatsoever. there's a problem somewhere in your system and you should try to find it.

Also give some specifics. Where is the game slow? how many civs and what map size? yadayada...

 

[Hawkster]

turning off autosave will make a significant difference - it compress the save files under 1.21 which slows things down a lot.

You can turn off some of the other options to speed things a little.

I have also noticed that anti-virus softwar running it the background can slow civ3 down quite a bit - if you have this running try temp disabling it - it may help.

 

[Pliny The Elder]

I turn everything else off, and even on huge maps, it just takes the 'puter, maybe, 30 seconds, or so...takes me about 20 minutes per turn, lol ;-)

 

[murewa]

hmmm... i think his question was about loading a game. for my pc it takes a minute to load a game. The only sure way to not get annoyed by this quite long load-time is not to save that frequently.

 

[wolfsforza]

Actually I was talking about how it's slowed down in general. I see the hourglass for a lot longer then usual and there's alot of hiccups. BUt the main thing is how long it takes during the time it cycles through the other players turns.

But thanks for the auto-save advice, I'm gonna try that right now.

 

[Pliny The Elder]

You wouldn't think a strategy game would take much graphics processing power, and civ2 didn't...but civ3 does. I have a GeForce2 mx/400, and I consider that the minimum. Also, RAM, RAM, RAM....the more, the better. I have 512 mb

 

[Maple]

It is usually the map specs... A huge map takes absurdly long between turns, even if there is only 8 civs. I have a 900 mHz with 712 RAM so I know that it's a game problem, not hardware.

Also, what is your OS? I used to use winME, but it is waay too buggy. I use win2k now, and the game only hiccups every 20 min. or so.

 

[murewa]

let's just wait for the 1.29 patch. non-visible draws were dropped so the game should speed up considerably