Horrible, horrible.. lag..

[Abrecan]

Yeah, I have not been able to finish a game, because by the time I get to mid/late game, I have to wait 15-25 minutes per turn because of the horribly lag. Towards the end, my computer just freezes up, this is getting ridiculous

Comp Specs(In a nutshell)

6600 nVidia Geforce(256 mb)
1gb RA
Amd Athlon 64 3400+
Current Page File Size: 2,500 mb

Some help would be greatly appreciated.

[Kuciwalker]

Check how much memory civ is using and if it's forcing you to swap.

[Abrecan]

Between 500 to 600 thousand kb, (CPU usage 90-100%) usage running only Civ IV BTS.

[lordrune]

If you're running background software, like anti-virus checkers, MSN messengers, and stuff, kill them while you play the game.

Obviously, make sure you don't have spyware or anything crazy on your PC.

Only thing you should need running in the background is a firewall e.g. ZoneAlarm (unless you have a NAT router, in which case you don't even need that).

You may want to stick to normal maps, and tweak your graphic settings so they're not too high. Large maps and (especially) huge maps can be a resource hog.

[Sotamuumi]

I get a crazy lag with BtS too later in the game.. Didn't happen with Warlords or Vanilla, and reading some posts on this forum I've learned that it's the newest patch that causes this. Lets hope the 3.13 patch will fix it

[TriMiro]

Try saving then leaving the game, wait a couple of minutes and then start the game again and load the save. I noticed that if I play too long, the gains starts to lag, and it does not depend on the map size as much as on the time I have spend playing. The above procedure works for me if the gains starts to lag.

[Abrecan]

Originally posted by TriMiro
Try saving then leaving the game, wait a couple of minutes and then start the game again and load the save. I noticed that if I play too long, the gains starts to lag, and it does not depend on the map size as much as on the time I have spend playing. The above procedure works for me if the gains starts to lag.

Yeah, this will usually fix it till late game, then nothing saves me from the uber lag, no matter what map type, and yeah, I have all the settings on low.

[Game-God]

Is the 6600 an AGP card?
I had some difficulty with my AGP card until I stepped up to a ATI 1600. This was my saving grace for gaming.

Here's some software that will make seeing the true story behind your computers operational state much easier. Be sure to check out the systemrequirementslab.com as it will tell you the story of whether your system gear is to far off set.(if you do not already have them):

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/Autoruns.mspx

http://www.ccleaner.com/

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html

http://www.systemrequirementslab.com (very important!!!)

http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/programs.php (post a log of this to see if there is anything else that can be done with your software thats running and to see if there is any bugs present in the background) BE CAREFUL!!! with this one though.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Abrecan
Between 500 to 600 thousand kb, (CPU usage 90-100%) usage running only Civ IV BTS.

You should be fitting inside memory then, unless you're running another app taking 100-200 MB at the same time.

[snoopy369]

If the card is AGP, consider adjusting the AGP acceleration settings. Also consider turning down or off AntiAliasing - that causes all sorts of issues.

[Experimentalist]

I play BtS on a dual-core AMD x64 2.8GHz machine w/ 2GB
of RAM, a nVidia 6800 w/ 256MB of RAM, and a 500GB
SATA-300 drive.

I am running Windows Vista Enterprise w/ all the
latest patches.. latest drivers from nVidia, etc.

.. And everything was going GREAT! Until I had the
entire map revealed, and then.. wow.. bog down
time. But it was strange.. the game more "hung" for
45-60 seconds each turn, more than got bogged
down. I only play HUGE maps on MARATHON speed.

In any case.. I was waiting for the 3.13 patch to see
if it helped, but read on another thread about setting
the "memsaver" option to "1" in CivilizationIV.ini

In any case.. it worked! The game is now incredibly
snappy and responsive. Turns now take only seconds.

I still look forward to the 3.13 patch.. maybe I can turn
memsaver off again or something. We'll see.

Give it a shot.. might help. Good luck!

Also.. Check out "ProcessExplorer" from SysInternals
(now Microsoft). It's a free tool that gives extremely
detailed info about running Processes. It may help you
track down the exact bottleneck. I use it frequently.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/processesandthreads/processexplorer.mspx

[joncnunn]

If the lag looks like it's from displaying things like friendly units moving, you could also turn that option off. If you have more spy points against multuple neighbors, it will otherwise spend quite a bit more time displaying things you don't care about.

But if the display is staying in one place during the lag, it's probably just going thru all the opponents moves. All I can really say about that is that if the AI were human it would be really complaining about how slow Jon is in the late game as well. If I'm at war, I'm often going to take over half an hour per turn deciding the proper order to make attacks. And even when not at war, on the turns I go thru the city queues that can easily take take 20 minutes to go thru all of them.