Performance issues... in Civilization III?

[Wataszka]

Hi Apolyton,

I made the account a while ago (when I started playing ), but kind of forgot about you - sorry for that!
I'm posting now because I recently acquired during a sale on Steam. I really like the game, but I have a major problem that also keeps me away from playing it now. I simply have a terribly low framerate in both the game and the main menu - oddly, the New Game setup, multiplayer stuff and Preferences work well.

I thought that this may be just the game's natural stiffness (low-frame animations, scrolling issues etc.) but I checked some gameplay videos and now I know it shouldn't be like this. Googling only led me to FPS problems with and (and I completely understand that) so I figured I would just ask and maybe someone knows what should I do.

My PC has a Penium 4, 1,5 GB ram and ATI Radeon 9550. I can provide more info if it's necessary.

Oh, I almost forgot: runs smoothly on High, so "upgrade your PC" is not an option!

[vmxa1]

How does that manifest itself? I mean the game is static. Do you mean that you have trouble scrolling the map? Do you mean that units move slowly? Do you mean that hitting the end of turn takes a long time to come back to you?

The game is low graphic demand so the your video card should not be an isue as long as it can handle DX9, may not even need no more than 8. It is quite cpu bound though. Memory is not usually an issue. If you are running a very large map and lots of civs, especially with lots of water, it will slow things down.

Later on maps like 250x250 with 31 civs you can see founding town animations take 30 seconds or more. Running on 3GH processors. You can turn off animation for all but battles.