Why is the game so Damn SLOW !?

[Joss21]

I played my first game v.1.07 in a celeron 750 with a 16 Mb voodoo banshee card. When i reached modern age, the game became very slow processing the turns (more than 3 min)

Now, i´ve upgraded to a hell of machine, a 1.7 Ghz Pentium IV with 256 Mb and a Geforce 2 64Mb.
This second game, when the map is full of cities, gets painfully slow (2 mins / turn) Before you get control, i mean.
I press the end of turn button and the PC freezes for almost a minute before showing some unit moving.

I upgraded middle game to 1.17f, to no avail.

Is this happening to anyone else?

Joss21

 

[Exile_Ian]

It's very dependent on the size of the map and the number of Civ opponents. I had to give up playing huge maps with max opponents (which is wonderfully complex gameplay) because it became unplayable in latter stages.

I currently play large maps with the default number of civs (12 is it?) and it works fine even in modern times (I would qualify anything under 2mins per turn as acceptable given the complexities). I'm running a P4 1.8GHz + 512Mb Ram and 32Mb Video card. I also turn off all animations except battles (still like to see the little fellers slug it out!).

 

[Tunnel Vision]

Just to give you an idea of what it might take - My system will play turns in the late game (Just won with a space race victory in 2028) with no significant lag at all at end turn, Large Map 6 civs plus me left. The longest amount of time it took to cycle thru a turn was when I had to watch enemy ships sail by(didnt turn the ani off or axe friend moves.) I have zero complaints about the speed.

Running AMD 1.6ghz (bench marks faster than a p4 2 gig), 1 gig of Ram and RAID setup for my hard drive (2 ATA 133 40 Gigs), have a GeForce 3 Ti 500 (64 Meg o Ram). Cost me 1600ish bucks at www.unitedmicro.com

Might run ok on slower systems, but I jumped from a k6-2 400, which was painful, so I'm not sure.

I suspect you would see the biggest difference by putting more ram in your machine.

 

[Badluck]

turn off animation in preference...

Animation for ennemy unit
animation for your unit
...
..
.

 

[The Art of War]

Turn off the music helps. I'm running with a Pentium III 300Mhz 128mb Compaq something or another and it is soooooooooo slow, and the more I save, the more likely it will freeze up....I disenjoy it until I wipe out all the civs except the other large civ.

 

[Maleficence]

The biggest factor slowing down computers is the number of units and the "new" pathfinding method that's been implemented in Civ3, if I remember correctly.

During the computers' turns the AI has to figure out the paths and decisions the PC is going to make and instead of using an heuristic algorithm (that's usually much quicker) they've gone for a truer sense of AI pathfinding, which gobbles up RAM like nothing else. So while your processor is quite beefy, the 256 you have in your PC are a measly amount. Get another 256 stick.
Crucial has good memory, good prices and free 2nd day air shipping. They also have a nice menu that will recommend the type of ram you need based on your motherboard, make/model or other information you can provide.

I run 16 civ huge map games on my lil laptop and it goes by in less than a minute thanks to the 512MB I have in there. And I'm only running a 1ghz processor.

Might not be as cheap for you to upgrade your RAM though as you're running a P4 which is probably running on RAMBUS, but good luck anyways =)

Edit: I forgot to mention this one last thing. If you're running windows98SE or lower, you'll run into problems if you put in more than 512MB's of memory in your computer, even 512 is probably a bit much for Windows to manage. I think Q#391225 had a way to fix this, which basically amounted to setting the a max size to the [VCACHE] section in one of the windows .ini files. If you are running win98SE I'll try and dig up the actual info, instead of hazily recalling it from memory ;p

 

[etj4Eagle]

Also make sure you have a good size virtual memory/swap file. I am running with a 600MB one. Also make sure that it is defragged.

 

[TypeZero]

im on a k6-2 500 with 184 megs of ram...i dont experience the 2-3 minute wait that the rest of you do...it goes by pretty quickly...but the movements are slow as hell and the screen barely scrolls...

maybe i should put a timer in front and see how it goes next time, because i thought i spent about 40 minutes on one game and it was actually 3 and a half hours

 

[ZotPod]

...i thought i spent about 40 minutes on one game and it was actually 3 and a half hours...

Fun games have a tendency to stretch out time

 

[sherod]

I'm running a PIII 800Mhz with 384MB ram and Windows ME.

With a huge map and 12 civs it is very, very slow. Several minutes pass on either side of my interactions, it's very frustrating - and I'm only up to the 1700's....

It would be great if the AI could work in the background, whilst I can look up stats and information, scroll around, save the game etc etc. But that would require a major rewrite... maybe in version 4.0?

 

[GourmetArtist]

I'm wondering if the game speeds up if there are actually less civs. Is there any difference between a huge map filled with cities with only 2 civs compared to one with multiple civs?

I gave up on a game because the wait was adding up to 30 minutes during a world war and 10 minutes during peace time.

 

[The Art of War]

Yeah, i think that the less civs you have, the faster you go. I was playing a standard size map yesterday and when I discovered the other civs, it just slowed down and took forever to do anything. then the sound went, then it froze up....i was sooooooooo mad.

 

[wotan321]

I think the point is..... playing on the same size map with the same number of civs... all things being equal.... this most recent patch causes the time between turns to last much longer.

Before 1.17, the time between turns was 10 seconds or less, now its 30 or 40 sometimes. Very annoying. What happened?

 

[simwiz2]

"I'm wondering if the game speeds up if there are actually less civs. Is there any difference between a huge map filled with cities with only 2 civs compared to one with multiple civs?"

I think there is less wait with less civs, because I have a celeron 366 mhz (well below min specs) and i play on 8 civ standard map. no complaints about animation speed, AI turn speed, or responsiveness. the only thing that my computer can freeze up on is the diplomacy with those 3d-rendered faces.

 

[jdogg]

Simple solution - kill off all those other darn civs!

 

[TypeZero]

well...maybe that was the reason...i just got the 1.17 patch earlier...

now i dont want to find out