Why is Civ III so slow??

[Cerryl]

One stupid think I notice, is how every AI unit seems to ungarrison, then regarrison all the time, seems very inefficient as well as pointless.

My only real complaint about the game is how crappy it runs, even with the 'baseline' 8 civs on a standard map. It's not as if it's using the most cutting edge graphics and sound.

 

[whstaff]

and I mean it. I spent many hours playing with 7 other civs and was always flummoxed by the time between turns, at least late in the game. Which for me has been as long as 10 mintutes!! When I encountered this I shut down everything running in the background, it never made a difference.
If these long wait times are inherent to the game design, I must conclude that the game design is is pretty badly flawed. If the game is always using 100% or even close to the processing capacity of a machine, this will ineivtably lead to some severe stability problems. The game is doing stuff in the background, such as that garrison un garrison thing mentioned above that is simply unnesesary. In my experience this has been manifested by the ai moving cavalry around in a patrol like movement for an entire move.
If the game works best on tiny maps, which I have never played, that should be mentioned somewhere in the documentation.
I've stopped playing the game, in my naivete I assumed the next patch would address this slow play/stability issue. After reading this thread, I'm pretty sure that nothing can be done about it.
In the meantime, I've just bought a top end machine, 1.8gb intel,512 ram, nvidia, and soundblaster and everytime I see the CIV III cable spot(usually on MSNBC), I'm tempted to station myself at my local Fry's electronics right next to the CIV III display and talk people out of buying it.
This game must be one hell of a cash cow, it's a great concept, take some of this money and fix the damn game.

 

[BeerCur]

I was playing with the Direct X that came with Civ 3, 8.0a, and things were running real slow. Now granted it's a 366 Celeron with a AGPx2 32meg ATI Video Card, which is about 3 years old, and 192 on board RAM so I wasn't expecting great shakes. But I really saw a great speed improvement in every aspect of the game when I downloaded Direct X 8.1, Microsoft's latest driver. Try it out...

~Matthew

 

[Boulboulgadol]

Here is who I am :
Athlon XP2100+ 512 ram DDR GeForce2GTS64Mo

Here is what I live :
30 mn of wait for an AI turn.

Here is what I'm gonna do :
Blow my head off !!!!!!


Seriously, explaine me why it can't be faster ?
I really think it could be improved by remodeling some of the AI way of playing. For example, why EVERY AI unit have to move ALL of its mouvement point every turn ?? Why Mr. AI doesn't know how tu use the "Fortify" option ?
I'm not talking about animation time, here. It just take so long for my AI friend to calculate every move for each unit, even if these ones are not displayed a screen.

I don't see what I can do.
I like BIG HUGE map game with MANY civs. Do I have to definitly forget this ?

 

[krinklyfig]

This used to be an issue for me as well, but then I had a 300MHz laptop. I am now finishing my first game on a huge map with my new computer, and it's running very fast. Previous to buying my new box, I couldn't run bigger than a normal sized map all the way through to the end of a game. Wow ... this is such a different game in a way with all these civs competing at the same time. There is a bit of a hang between turns, but it's maybe five seconds, or ten if it's during war - can't be much longer than that, and even that's rather rare. This is after the AI has moved and animated and so forth, and while it is working ("waiting") for your turn to start. It's not like it's flying at that point, but it is a very short wait, considering. I have an AthlonXP 1700 with 265MB RAM and 64MB shared onboard SiS AGP video, and my mobo is a PCChips, which have improved quite a bit lately, although it's not a top of the line. The video is substantial for an onboard config, although the sound is lacking, but am going to add a better soundcard soon. So, I dunno, as my system isn't as fast as some others' who have been having problems with this, but it's a fast machine - it can handle nearly all new games well, including the 3D ones, and almost the only time it's an issue is with older games that designed for Glide that didn't port well to OpenGL, like Descent 3, sadly. Civ III is not such a game, however, and everything runs much more smoothly, including all the animations. There was one occasion, right at my entry into a major war, that caused a serious hang at the end of a turn for about two turns, and then everything was fine. I am guessing there must have been some serious churning going on right there, but it recovered soon. I must mention that I am running the DYP mod, so I am guessing that taxes it even more, with all the extra units and improvements. But before I couldn't even run DYP all the way through on my 300MHz with a regular map - it would get so slow as to be unplayable in modern times. However, I could run a normal game all the way through on a normal map with my laptop. I have PTW with the latest patch and Win98, and all my DirectX dirvers are updated.

Anyhoot, not sure how helpful this really is, but thought it would be worth putting it out there.

- krinklyfig

-- edit - well, it actually takes about 30 seconds now, but that's not too bad, and I'm up to the year 1975 with accelerated production and 16 civs starting out - there are still 13 left. I already won a diplomatic victory, and went back a turn and am now working on a different victory ... maybe the space race. Still, given that it's DYP and a huge map, I am impressed with 30 seconds between turns. I am still not at all sure why it would take ten times longer on machines that clock much faster, but it seems to work pretty well on mine. OK, I am knocking on wood ... don't wanna jinx it.

 

[Raven1er]

Me-
winxp, 128 mb ram, 777 mghz intel penty 3 processor
40 gig hd
rage 128 from ATI video card
using a 3 yr old comp that hasnt been like internally upgraded for 2 yrs
and when i play huge map with all possible civs, it takes me like .0000001 milli/nano seconds to do anything

lol wierd huh? direct x 8.1 and the video card is like i think older than my comp itself and my comp has been through so many viruses and i had it bumped up to windows xp from win98se like 2 yrs ago and even when i had win98 civ3 worked the same

i must have a miracle machine or something