Why is Civ III so slow??

Rosicrucian

Chieftain
Joined
Jun 23, 2001
Messages
84
I have an Athlon 1.4 with 512MB RAM! And at work I have a 1000MhZ machine with 256. When the civs get big, civ 3 is slow as hell on both machines. I mean really, should it take 5 seconds from the time I raze a city, to calculate the new borders? And should it take about 2 seconds per city when popping up those "Antioch has build an airport. What would you like to build next" screens.

Why is it so slow? It's not like there are millions of units it has to update each time.

this really ruins the 'pace' of the game IMHO. I click 'next turn' and I don't get to really start moving my guys for another 3 min+.
 
This will probably get moved to the Tech Support forum, but in the meantime...

What are your video and sound card? Driver issues could definitely be playing havok as far as the several-second delay for border recalculations and so forth.

-- What OS?
-- How many civs are you playing with?
-- What map sixe?
-- Using any mods?
-- Have you defragged your HD lately?
-- Shut down all systray apps and other memory hogs (scanner software, antivirus, etc.)

Based on the system specs you provided you shouldn't have that kind of lag to perform the actions you're describing, so it's likely a configuration issue.

The delay between turns is almost entirely dependent on map size, number of civs in the game (and by association, the number of units on the map), etc.


Dan
 
Trust me, it's not a problem with my computer. Athlon 1.4, 512 MB RAM, WinXP, Geforce2, defrag every sunday at 2am. Every person I've talked to in real life has similar problems. Granted, I am playing a huge map. But the game should still not take this long to calculate new borders, to do a city's "turn", etc.

It's ridiculous.
 
Are you really serious Dan? 5 seconds to build a city - I wish - its up to 30 seconds at times for me.

I have a nice example of a saved game that really strains the limits of the game (admittedly).

It's Marla's World Map - no other mods - 15 civ opponents - and entering modern times it has now become unplayable (which is a huge shame since I was really enjoying it).

My spec is:
Dell 8200 - 1.8Ghz P4; 512Mb RDRAM; 32Mb nVidia Geforce2 MMX; Windows XP. All latest drivers (including the 'fixed' video drivers).

I appreciate that I'm pushing the limits of the game, but maybe that's just what you need to see and to test any future changes to the game.

I'd love to upload it here - but its around 700k zipped and the limit here is 500k. Can I email it to you Dan?

(Edited)

Never mind - I uploaded it to this thread please try the game and see if its slow for everybody.
 
Same here. I've got a Athlon 1400, 512ram, Geforce2, Win2000. 16 players on a huge map (random). Once I conquer a city or raze it it can take it's sweet time to calculate everything and let me play again. Also, the computer turns can sometimes take minutes to complete, on the other hand some times they only take a few seconds, which is what I expected.

Frank V.
 
I have an Athlon 700, 512MB RAM and mine is very slow (5 mins wait each turn in 1480AD) between turns on a huge map with 16 civs, unmodified, fully patched game. I dont have any other programs running, not even sitting in my systray.

Dan, I really respect you taking the time and the interest to reply to posts here, but are you sure you aren't aware of how the game cripples even the best of PCs (NOT including MY spec in that btw), on the larger games?

What I really want to know though is does anyone playing 16 civs, huge map and a good PC NOT have any speed issues?

Please feel free to direct me to a thread where all this has been covered as I will happily wade through old muck rather than lay fresh stuff here :)
 
Specs: P4 1.8, Win 98, 512 ram, etc, etc......


I only have a problem when I am running other programs in the background. When you are playing the game, hit the "windows" key on your keyboard. Look at your system tray. Is it full of icons? As a tech I find most casual users problems with any programs is trying to run too much sh*t. Get rid of (or at least don't run on startup) anything you don't really need Another thing I have found is that if Win 2000 or XP and drivers are not loaded in a specific sequence performance suffers greatly.
 
Originally posted by JimTheConqueror
I have an Athlon 700, 512MB RAM and mine is very slow (5 mins wait each turn in 1480AD) between turns on a huge map with 16 civs, unmodified, fully patched game. I dont have any other programs running, not even sitting in my systray.

Dan, I really respect you taking the time and the interest to reply to posts here, but are you sure you aren't aware of how the game cripples even the best of PCs (NOT including MY spec in that btw), on the larger games?

What I really want to know though is does anyone playing 16 civs, huge map and a good PC NOT have any speed issues?

Please feel free to direct me to a thread where all this has been covered as I will happily wade through old muck rather than lay fresh stuff here :)

I don't have issue with the speed. On a huge map w/ 16 civs what do you expect. (Just try to play CtP II w/ 32 civs - that's a nightmare)
 
To be brutally honest, the game simply does not deal well with huge maps and 16 simultaneous civs. On some machines it's better than others, and there are things (most notably turning off all semblance of animation) you can do to lessen the chug factor, but something has to give, either the world size, number of civs, or the AI.

I don't really think dumbing down the AI is an option, so... :D

But really, this is the reason we were pretty dead-set on shipping with only 8 simultaneous civs (until we decided up it to 16 in response to overwhelming fan demand), and why I still recommend playing with 8 civs or less for optimal performance.

Now, all that said, I have been referring mostly to delay between turns. I wasn't aware that there was an appreciable delay when it was your turn for pop-ups and so on, but I can see how recalculating borders could be a really nasty problem on a massive map, especially when most of, if not the entire world's been uncovered.

I'm not sure there's really much I can do, believe it or not the game has already been through several optimization processes (it used to be considerably slower :eek:)

Dan
 
I never knew about the 8 civs being upped to 16 issue, blimey.

Ok, fair enough on that then.

I can actually put up with the slowness when I play the Huge map with everyone involved...I will do other things in between turns remembering to check back every minute or so to respond to diplomacy requests etc.

I wouldnt want the AI dumbed down and I dont want graphics toned down either, wouldnt want anything to detract from the great experience that Civ 3 is no matter how slow it runs under certain conditions.

So why bother complaining you ask? I wasnt, I was just wondering if anyone out there CAN run it nice and fast and if so, how? :)

I'm going to start an 8 civ standard map game now, and maybe play a few turns a week on my huge game as it really is becoming quite an enthralling world at the moment.

Keep up the sterling work in fighting Firaxis' corner Dan, and btw, whats your favourite Civ? :)
 
Thanks for the replies Dan.

I realise we're probably just pushing the game too hard. But its kinda hard to move back to smaller maps and less Civs when you've been engrossed in a maxed out game and relishing the complexity.

I just wanted to establish that there wasn't some trick I was missing (and from what I can tell there isn't).

I've shutdown everything I can (not easy on XP compared to Windows 9x) and it doesn't really make a big difference, since Civ3 tends to get priority anyway. The fact that it uses 100% of the CPU is an indication that it couldn't get a lot more of the system if it tried.

I'll have to scale back a bit so I can get to a decent ending (which is a shame). It's certainly justified me buying the best spec'ed PC I could afford - its been getting a lot of exercise! :)
 
My favorite civ would have to be the Latverians, led by the dictator Victor Von Doom (Science and Military).

Special unit is, of course, the Doombot.


Dan
 
My civ is game is way too slow on a huge map with 16 civs. And I just bought a new computer. What gives? Right now, I am using a state of the art PI- 150 mhz Windows 3.1 mad machine with 16 megs of ram. I also sport a 2mb graphic card. And this thing still runs slow. What do I need? A supercomputer or something???

I used to have only 8 megs of ram, but a friend thought Civ3 would work better with 16. Call me Mr. Moneybags, but I laid out the dough and the improvement was unnoticabe.

I don't know what the people at Firaxis are pulling, but I am going to mail you my computer if I can't get it working properly.
 
ROFL

It's probably the dual floppy drives slowing it down - maybe you should invest in a hard drive next?
 
Heh, I havent discovered that tribe in my travels Dan, but the doombot sounds scarey...bet a spearman can still take one out though :)

PS - Dan, is there ANY heads up at all you can give us on the next patch (assuming there will be one before the add-on)? I'll understand if you can't, but if ever we meet in mulitplayer, im going to treat you like I do the Germans, Russians and the Iroqouis. [punch] ;)
 
Originally posted by Jezner
My civ is game is way too slow on a huge map with 16 civs. And I just bought a new computer. What gives? Right now, I am using a state of the art PI- 150 mhz Windows 3.1 mad machine with 16 megs of ram. I also sport a 2mb graphic card. And this thing still runs slow. What do I need? A supercomputer or something???

I used to have only 8 megs of ram, but a friend thought Civ3 would work better with 16. Call me Mr. Moneybags, but I laid out the dough and the improvement was unnoticabe.

I don't know what the people at Firaxis are pulling, but I am going to mail you my computer if I can't get it working properly.

:rotfl:
 
Originally posted by Exile_Ian
The fact that it uses 100% of the CPU is an indication that it couldn't get a lot more of the system if it tried.

I think it could get a lot more of the system if it tried harder. The number cruncher grinds to a dead stop while waiting for the user to respond to a popup window. When the user response has no effect on subsequent calculations, that wait time is wasted. There are two ways around this that come to mind. One would be for the cruncher to continue at a lower priority while waiting for the user to click. The second would be to save all those messages and display them together in a single window after they're done (eg., one window showing all civs switching wonder productions when they're beat). There are drawbacks to both of course, and this doesn't deal with culture border recalculation on your turn, but the between turn wait would be improved.

Then again, I'm happy playing on a large map with max civs. Slowdown isn't a problem for me then.
 
The fact that it uses 100% of the CPU is an indication that it couldn't get a lot more of the system if it tried.
I'm curious about the CPU utilization aspect. I've noticed Civ3 uses as much of the CPU as it can get 100% of the time, regardless of whether it's calculating AI moves or just animating workers waiting for me to do something. There's no way that animation should be taking 100% of the CPU. Even if I send it to the background and pull up some other program, Civ3 is still using as much CPU time as it can get. When it's not even on the screen it should be using 0% of the CPU. Just what is it doing with all that CPU time? For a program designed specifically for a multi-tasking OS this seems rather less neighborly than one would desire.
 
I suspect that the AI is processing even while its your turn (sort of multitasking). Haven't you ever noticed when for instance you're making a trade with another civ, there are times where the map seems to have updated in the background? Also, what about when you trade a tech with a civ and then go off (on the same turn) to try and trade it with them and find they've obtained it from the civ you previously dealt with?

I have monitored CPU usage and it sticks at 100% while the AI is in 'deep-think' mode and usually drops to 20% or less when its waiting on me.
 
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