SGOTM 13 - klarius

[ThERat]

I also think we have to self research flight rather than waiting for the AI. But, you never know...
Saving money shouldn't be a problem as we don't have that much infra to spend on any longer. Only commercial docks.

I will pm AlanH then. I hope this is just a glitch, though it doesn't affect us that much.

As for defense, I would continue to put infantry in our border cities so that France can't take that many cities in a sneak attack. Once we get attacked by someone, ally the other 'big' opponents and we should have even more land to settle in the end. I guess the fact that France is annoyed stems from that one city that touches their city directly. I hoped that we might get some positive culture flips to us. Is there a programm to check the possibilities for that?

 

[Northern Pike]

Looking on the graphs and QSC statistics, I doubt any other team got the GLib.

Are you confident even with regard to Team Ivan, for whom there's no QSC result?

 

[ThERat]

I got a pm from AlanH and he will check our save. He wished for us to suspend play until he checked the save. I would say this issue isn't really game breaking, it would just be nice to know whether we can save the worker tasks for something more useful.

NP, the culture graph seems to suggest that we are the only ones to grab a wonder.

 

[klarius]

Ivan and the others never had a culture rate increase compatible with GLib.
Only Spooks is early enough that they might still finish it before the AI.
But they seem to have prioritized the settling of the second island.
They didn't have masonry at QSC and are the fastest to get several cities up on the island.

 

[AlanH]

I think I've fixed your save. As I suspected, it was some corruption that occurred when the scenario was converted from PtW to C3C. Marshes and Volcanoes didn't exist in PtW, and I guess they weren't set up properly.

I'll fix the other team saves as well, of course.

Apologies. Please let me know if you have any further problems.

 

[AlanH]

Secondly, when I clicked onto stacks, it said done in 1 turn but nothing happened.

PS. I didn't find any workers stuck at 1 turn left on marsh clearance in your save. Maybe I missed one? I was hoping to verify that the fixed file would result in that clearance completing next turn. All I was able to do was to confirm that an interrupted worker could now be assigned to clearing wetlands, and that the turns to complete reduces OK for those already doing it.

 

[klarius]

Thanks, AlanH, for your super fast problem fix.
So, Wotan, you're up for a few turns in this monster if you find the time.

Our general first goal should still be to get our own research up in the existing cities.
We can get a few more cities in Arabia and maybe soon Iroquois and also can settle some more.
I really would like to have a land target for France and Mongols, but I see no easy way short of one declaring on us and we ally the other. Iroquois are too weak probably. Babylon and Korea are scientific and we need them for the modern age free techs.

 

[ThERat]

Thanks AlanH for fixing the issue.

Now, we should have 2 more cities soon after clearing the marshes. As klarius pointed out, we can send some settlers over to Arabia for more cities.

I can only think of declaring on Mongols once the deal with them is over. If we can get France to ally, this should be possible.

 

[klarius]

The problem with Mongols is that we would have some tricky turns before the French troops will come to our aid. It's likely that we lose a couple of cities, with all the cavs I and ThERat have seen.
Also, when our big gpt trade runs out we are probably able to get a similar big trade again.

 

[Wotan]

Have now downloaded the save after AlanH had a go at it. Will have a look at the save tonight but I guess it is pretty straigtforward as inducated by you guys. Will focus on science and try to balance the powers in the game. Special interest in France/Mongols and see if I can get them to fight somewhere.

 

[klarius]

Well, France-Mongols - we cannot do much there.
We don't want to be at war with either of them currently, as they have so many cavs running around.
If one of them declares on their own, we sure want to ally the other, but the defense for the initial onslaught will not be easy. There were stacks of cavs running around that can easily eat armies in cities - and they will.
A possibility might be to set them both on Iroquois for now, to get their troops away from our land. Problem is just how long the Iroquois will survive .

 

[Wotan]

Have tried to play the game for some time now. Don't know if it is my computer or the save. Loaded it twice yesterday, check MMing and hit return, it starts the IBT phase and after a 10 minutes of activities that I can observe with AI action apparently hangs.Tried again today at lunch and left it for two hours and nothing? Could someone else on the team try the save and see if it goes to the next turn?

 

[ThERat]

ok, downloading now, will try that and give feedback


edit: downloaded, hit enter without doing anything and it works. did not do anything else for spoiler prevention, merely checked whether the game stalls (which it doesn't). hope that's fine that another player continues (klarius?) from the 1150AD save.

Wotan, what processor do you have? I have a dual core with 2 gig ram these days and C3C runs pretty smooth, even huge maps

 

[klarius]

I'll have a look (play a few turns if possible) tomorrow, if no other player surfaces miraculously.

 

[Wotan]

It is weird, but I guess it is to do with the hardware I have. 2.66/1GB is apparently not enough for this game, at least not as the game goes into the monsterous end game. I will try to play the next turn set, maybe something in the save did not agree with my computer after all. Can at least live on the hope i can participate again. You take it klarius.

@ThERat: 20 mins between your first post and the edit says it all. last time I played a turn set the IBT averaged just under an hour.

 

[AlanH]

lurker's comment: In order to test the marshes fix I ran your save through the IBT a few times. On my Mac, running the Mac version of C3C, it took 8.5 mins, running one core of my 2.66GHz quad, at or around 100%. Out of curiosity, I also ran the same IBT in the Windows version of C3C, on the same hardware, but in a Windows virtual machine with 1 GByte of memory and using a single core for Windows XP and Civ3. It took 6.5 mins. at 100%.

So, in a 2.66 GHz 1 GByte Windows XP system, which is similar to Wotan's configuration, it runs quite well here. My CPUs are Intel dual Xeon 5150, with 4 MByte L2 cache per CPU.

 

[klarius]

I played 3 1/2 turns up to now and it worked fine. I'm sick currently and couldn't finish at a nice point up to now.
I look to finish tomorrow with 4-6 turns played.
We have MP and MT will work easily in 4 turns.

IBTs are about 20 mins on my notebook. Not really fast but also not a lot if you MM like crazy .

 

[Wotan]

Thanks for the feedback AlanH. Last turnset I played the IBT (with some delays for addressing any popups) ran for about 40 mins per turn. I might have a very badly configured systam. I know that some other applications are unexplicably slow on my "private" computer while running smoothly on a pretty similar lap top I use professionally. Just can't put a game on it when I have myself argued we should not have such applications on job computers .

And I agree to a certain extent that 20 mins IBT when MMing is not much but it aggregates to hours added over a full turn set. And adding several hours of non-player generated "down-time" is just too frustrating. When I MM I am active and enjoy it, there is a difference in that sense.

 

[klarius]

Well Wotan, your computer should be good enough to run this game at least as fast as my 1.6Ghz, 1 1/4 GByte laptop.
The only explanation that it runs so slow is that somehow background applications eat a lot of memory. It's unlikely that they eat a lot of processing power and that can be closed out by looking on the process manager.
There is the brute force approach to that - more memory.
Or a clean new setup of windows. Takes a couple of hours, but if you compare to many hours of waiting in civ ...

 

[AlanH]

There is the brute force approach to that - more memory

Since my Windows system only had 1 GByte and ran OK, more memory would only work if there are other activities chewing up memory.

The System Monitor (in Control Panel->Performance & Maintenance->Administrative Tools->Performance) allows you to display graphs of different aspects of system activity in real time.

On my system the IBT activity seems to be all about CPU time in Windows, with no memory paging going on. So it sounds more as if you have something else thrashing away at your CPU and/or memory in the background.