Unusually long start up times

[Amble]

When loading up RoM the game takes about 1-2 minutes to bring up the splash screen for civ 4 and the progress bar for the initialization. It stalls a bit, about 30 seconds or so, on Init XML (Uncached). Then everything loads up just fine. I pick a map to play and hit "Go." It starts to load up, about 15% and stalls. Depending on map size this may be 2-3 minutes for standard or 10-15 minutes for gigantic. After a bit more of a wait it proceeds to about 80% and stalls briefly again, then finishes loading. After that the game/mod seems to run just fine. It doesn't take nearly as long to load a save game, though it's still a while. Assuming that's because of the gigantic map size. However loading a save game still requires the long initialization times.

What I'm wondering is if this is normal or if there's something I can do to fix it. I had cleaned out my custom assets before installing RoM and even did a clean install and still getting the same problem.

I'm running 3.19 of BTS and RoM Mega 2.81 with the extra civ pack.
Windows Vista 64 Ultimate
Althlon X2 4200 @ 2.42
8800GTX 768MB
Two RAID0 Arrays w/ >60GB on my pagefile drive
3GB memory

 

[cdman1990]

First of all the extra civ pack makes the game load slower.

Second try to reduce the graphic details.

Third you should try to install some of the unloaded modules, there are some that make the game load quicker.

And last try to install A New Dawn modmod, it has some speed boosts that make the game load at least 30% faster.


I myself have a Nvidia 9500GT 1024mb and still the game takes 5-10 minutes to load.

 

[NBAfan]

Are you using the Perfectworld 2 map? That one take a while the generate the map.

 

[zappara]

Loading the mega version does take a long time because the game has to check every xml file and art file reference during start up and there's lots of them (Civ 4+BtS+Warlords+RoM+extra civ modules).