slow games on HUGE maps

[Dire]

is throw more ponies at the problem, aka, a faster processor and more memory.

I play on a P3-733/512m and have realized that until I throw the game onto a faster box the most I can run is a standard map.

The most obvious is of course, animations. Shut then off, this will save you some time.

The largest issue that I see as taking "time" to compute is the cultural lines. Every time you take over a city, you feel that "pause". Thats the gaming engine recomputing where all the borders are at. Well, any round that your, or some other nations cultural borders change, expand, get pushed back, what have you, that all needs to be recomputed.
This could be corrected. What Civ3 needs is the ability to shut off cultural borders and going back to Civ2 style. This would allow the game to fly.

Or (and this comes from the UNIX systems programmer part of me), they could have optimized the internal loops of the system and wrote their code not be such bloatware (tm). I have this very strong feeling that everything is written using OOP. Great for small and midscale projects, but when your system has to munch through thousands of objects your internal performace is going to suffer.

Take for example, UO Third Dawn 3d graphic client (obtw its junk) was first written using OOP. They later removed it all due to the performance hit it took.

Conclusion? More power or smaller map. There are things that you can shut off that "help", but nonetheless do not address the larger issue that .. yes .. for how great the game is .. its internals operate as efficient as a automobile with watered down gas.

I guess along these lines it would be interesting if at least Firaxis make any attempts to thread the computer movements. A dual CPU box maybe the kick that this game needs. Just a thought.

 

[zombyman]

Knightfall68 -- That sounds interesting....and it's fun with 16 civ on a small map? Sounds like that might get a little crowded but I'll have to check it out. What exactly would I change in the editor to allow me to use all 16 civs? And you experience little or no pause?

Cephyn -- I did search for it...and www.gamecopyworld.com didn't have it when I last looked....maybe I should check it again? I might just get another copy if I can do that for only a couple of bucks, that seems like a better idea.

Thank you guys for the help....it is much appreciated....

Zomby

 

[Exile_Ian]

Regarding the slow down with max civs on huge maps.

I'm currently playing on Marla's Map (Real World Huge) with max number of Civs (the first time I've done this), and now I'm up to around the 1700's at the Infantry/Artillary/nearly Destroyers kind of age.

Yes the turns take around 3 to 4 minutes now and I'm pretty sure its not graphics related (as I have most of the options turned off).

BTW my PC is a Dell 8200, 1.8Ghz P4, 512 Mb RDRAM, 32MB nVidia card - not exactly a slouch machine!

I fully believe that the slowdown of turns is related to the constantly recalculated civilization boundaries more than anything else. I've watched the game carefully (especially on my own turns) and its notable that the biggest pauses occur when something happens that could affect your border (e.g. capture/lose a city, build a significant cultural improvement etc.). I'm suspecting that the game logic is recalculating for the whole world every time something changes (rather than perhaps once per turn or just on a local basis).

Maybe Dan could confirm whether this is the case and whether there's any plans to review this part of the game? Don't get me wrong, I love the cultural border feature of the game and love the complexity of huge maps and huge nbr of opponents, and I endure the long delays because I really want to see if I can finally win a big game like this.

[BTW - hint to anyone who wants to have a chance to dominate a Real World game - pick the Zulus! You start down in Southern Africa with only the Egyptians posing any real territorial threat. I played for massive expansion and manage to secure 2/3rds of the continent before anyone else started bothering me. Now I'm at war with most of my neighbours and am likely to lose all my satellite cities in South America, Asia and Australia - but hey-ho, I'm gradually gaining control of the whole of Africa and I'm No.1 Civ by a large margin.]

 

[Knightfall68]

Zombyman

It WAS a blast. Though my first try at it wasn't as successful. I only had room for ONE city before being culturally locked. Try as I might, I just couldn't get enough military out of that one city to take over my close neighbor.

But my second try...I had room for like 4 or 5 cities initially. England declared war on my early. I got an alliance with her neighbors on the other side and we split her cities. That gave me like another 3 cities. I consolidated my power.....waited for my Samuri to come on line and then declared war on my eastern neighbor, the Russians. I got an alliance with both of her other neighbors, but this time with my samuri I had the power to take most of Russia....so I went from like 8 cities to 14 after that.....then in Industrial, all out world war broke out, and that is when I really got power.....that world war eliminated like 4 or 5 civs.

I am at work now and can't look at the editor....but if you go to the rules section, it is there under one of the tabs.....you can easily modify any world size. Not only can you change the number of civs, but you can change what size is actually used for each map. But, I left the size of the small world alone, and just changed the max civs to 16....and yeah, I got NONE of the slowdowns I got on the huge maps.

I think another key to this being fun for me was I chose LARGE continents on this small map....so there was a lot of land to fight for.