How slow will this be with 256 MB of RAM

[I'mNowCivilized]

I will eventually be getting more, but I am wondering how playable the game is with just 256?

[spy14]

I would suggest fairly awful, 256 could be quite a bottleneck - what OS are you running, also what graphics board and processer?

[I'mNowCivilized]

I'm running XP, with a Pentium IV 2.93 GHz chip. My Vid Card is a Radeon 9200 128 MB of RAM. If it's gonna be slow, I'll just wait.

I should add, I don't want to wait but if I am just going to be frustrated I guess I have little choice. Probably just as well though. It gives them time to patch it.

[Qwertqwert]

RAM needs to be upgraded from time to time, you'd really need more for almost any game now to run decently.

[spy14]

The rest of your system is more than capable of running the game, but you've bottlenecked it with the lack of ram - a good lump of ram is as important as a fast gfx card.

The good news is that ram is dirt cheap nowadays - to get Civ4 running optimally i'd say get an extra 512meg on top of what you have now. Having a look on PC world, i've just seen a 512mb ram board at £33 (about $40). Ish.

[LDiCesare]

Your game should run just foine on small maps.
Mine has a 32Mb RAM vid card (under spec) with T&L that doesn't seem to work well so I uncover the map, 256Gb RAM, and is a 3-year old 1.8GHz pentium laptop runngin WinXP. The game is very playable, so you shouldn't have any problem on small, probably medium maps. Just make sure to increase the available virtual memory to 1G or more.

[Mirkwood]

I am running the game well so far its not too slow though things are getting slower but its still playable even with the animations on i am on a small map at about 1880 industrial age

My specs are pentium 4 1.5gb
Geoforce2
384 RAM
Windows XP

so i would have thought you would be ok

i will report back if it slows to a snail b4 i finish the game