[Rollover] only works half the time. Too much RAM usage. Long load times. more...

[snoochems]

Who would've thought that the day would come when a turn based strategy used over 1GB of RAM.

My current game, (huge continent map, 14 AI civs) has my PC using OVER 1.4GB of RAM. Looking at the task manager, Civ4 is taking up about 1.2GB. This is ridiculous! Civ 3 used under 300MB with 31 civs on an even larger map!

Thank goodness I have 1.5GB of RAM installed.

Plus… how buggy is this game! It crashes, freezes, quits to desktop way to frequently! In my current game, I can’t even load a saved game from within the game, and if I try, it quits to desktop. (this strange phenomena only has happen with this particular game I’m playing). I can only load from the main menu screen!

Also, I’ve got decent HDD’s in RAID0, yet the game takes forever to load.

This compounds the frustration of the constantly crashing bug, as loading the game again take ages.

Now I know this is on a ‘huge’ map… but surely… FEAR and QUAKE4 don’t take this long to load. They don’t even take up this much RAM. And yet, to an observer like me, those two FPS games look much, much more demanding that Civ4.

Why why why????!!

And then there are the bugs that are just plain annoying… like how the [ROLLOVER] mouse help only works half the time. The silly civlopedia is just a major step down from the one in Civ 3 too. This has to be a bug right? Or a joke? And how bad is the world builder. Placing a single tile takes forever! Placing rivers requires a magic wand!

Another VERY annoying bug that has only just started happening is that when I change a civic, once I press ‘revolution’, ALL my civics go back to there original 4000BC choices. Then I have anarchy for three turns. So, I just simply can’t change my civics. I’ve recently also noticed little messages pop up on left of the screen informing me that “XXXX failed to load”.

These problems are just infuriating as the game itself is great.

For the love of all things holy, some of these bugs are just show stoppers. How can they release a game with so many bugs!

 

[MrRogers]

Ati Radeon X800 pro 256mb
Athlon XP 2800+ 2.07Ghz
1GB Ram

This is the exact thing that is happening to me, and I had come to the same conclusion. Loading my huge game with 18 civs takes over 3.5 minutes, I have to go away and do something while it loads, its like back in the Commodore 64 days!

The annoying-as-hell rollover issue happens with me ROUTINELY, but I have found that the missing rollover sometimes comes back if you visit the city screen.

Uses between 1.4 and 1.5 GB of ram, as snoochems says not even high performance FPS games like Quake4 or Farcry had anywhere near this memory usage or general slowness.

Also very annoying is the fact that if you go back to the desktop midgame (either on purpose with alt-tab or forced there by and annoying popup) when you go back in the menus fail to re-appear! Forcing you to to have to kill the program and spend another age loading up. I credit(/debit?) this to the high memory usage.

I just can't believe I can get an extremely good framerate in Quake4, but a ****ty 5fps with a TURNBASED STRATEGY GAME!

I am thinking that perhaps the fact the game is held together by scripting languages is probably a big reason for this. If it was coded like a normal game (and thus much more difficult to mod, I assume the whole reason they did it like this was to make it easy to do so) it would run better I am sure.

And yes the Civilopedia is a total piece of ****. Who knows what the ambiguous icons mean?

Don't get me wrong, I'm still playing it (it's a fun game...!)

 

[Elsewhere]

A turn-based strategy game would use a lot more memory than a FPS, because there's a lot more AI stuff going on (it consumes memory, unlike FPS-style triggered events), not to mention the game data structures and whatnots. Also, they're written in C/C++ which manages memory a lot more efficiently than an interpreted language like Python, which Civ4 relies on.

That said, I still think the game is coded with ridiculous inefficiency.