Unit Animation painfully slow

[Kael]

I just installed Civ III on my wifes computer (getting her ready to play me in multiplayer) but all of the animation just crawls. This includes movement, settlers building cites, workers improving land or being captured, units battleing, etc.

I have disabled as many of these animations as I can but the ones that I can't disable are still slow, plus I would really like to turn the animations back on if at all possible.

The computer is:

1.3 GHz Athlon
256 Meg of RAM
Windows XP Home
Builit in 3d card with 8 meg of Ram

I do have the 1.21f patch installed. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Kael

 

[Kael]

Has no one else ever seen this?

 

[hokie96]

Yeah, it's a very common problem that seems related to the fact that we have Athlon XP/Win XP/ and perhaps NVidia video cards and/or AMD mobos. Although it sounds like you lack the NVidia part. I've complained loudly to tech support, and they are of ZERO help.

I was able to get unit animation working when disabling the Plug and Play service through msconfig. See if that works for you. One problem in my case is that I lose all sound (for all Windows, not just Civ3). Tech support had the nerve to suggest that this was a viable solution -- to play the game without sound and restart my computer each time I wanted to play it. Idiots.

They won't provide a refund or any course of remediation for putting out a crappy product. Rant off.

Anyway, see if that one thing works for you, and report back. Maybe we can find something in common.

 

[Kael]

I will give it a try this evening, thanks!

 

[ryan_rojas]

I have the same problem, running an athlon xp, winxp, and an geforce2 mx400. Damn game. Maybe if enough of us write in to Infogrames, they'll fix whatever's wrong. Turning off plug and play gave me the same results. Faster animations, no sound.

 

[Myth]

I have the same problem, specs:

PIII 866 mhz
Windows XP
GeForce 256

Not an Athlon processer. Havn't checked the Plug & Play solution. I agree with ryan_rojas, we should get people writing in. Firaxis are pretty good, and I suspect they would make an effort to fix the problem if enough of us complain.