How comes scenario's are so slow?

[Willem]

Originally posted by Dissident


And I still haven't turned of showing enemy move animations. it takes a while to watch all the other civs galleys move past my field of vision.

You should try adding NoAIPatrol=1 to your Conquests.ini file, it might help.

[Sim]

Yes, it's VERY disappointing.

I've spent the last four days making a historical scenario (Imperialism in 1903) on the huge 362x362 world map, about 12 hours each day.

When I loaded the unfinished version, it took about 5 minutes at startup to load - so far, so good.

But now, after I've configured the 24 civs (set which techs and money they have, renamed them), when I try to load it, it has not finished loading after one hour (!) - and I've not even placed units yet !!!


Has anybody here an idea what I can do in order to prevent the last 50 hours of work on that scenario from having been useless?

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by Dissident
well it's not too bad on my old P3 700. Even on the Rise of Rome scenario with over 200 units.

And I still haven't turned of showing enemy move animations. it takes a while to watch all the other civs galleys move past my field of vision.

Even with that my turns seem to be under 1 minute (though I haven't timed them)

Diss, some of these scenarios involve the max 512 cities and probably close to the max ~4000 units. Quite a few more calculations and moves for the AI (and you) than one of the Firaxis conquests, thankfully Firaxis (probably the beta's) knew not to make larger conquests as a part of this expansion.

[Saint Marcus]

Has anybody here an idea what I can do in order to prevent the last 50 hours of work on that scenario from having been useless?

nothing can be done about it.

Try building a scenario on a 140x140 map, or wait a few years till PCs are fast enough to effectively run bigger maps.

[Dis]

Originally posted by asleepathewheel



Diss, some of these scenarios involve the max 512 cities and probably close to the max ~4000 units. Quite a few more calculations and moves for the AI (and you) than one of the Firaxis conquests, thankfully Firaxis (probably the beta's) knew not to make larger conquests as a part of this expansion.

and thank god for that . Rise of Rome map was plenty big enough for me. It takes a long time to get 20% of the land. It took me over 14 hours of gameplay. And I played as Rome- the easiest civ to play as.

I guess you guys like those mega huge scenarios maps. I guess it does kind of suck for you guys. I don't know why things slow up so badly. Much of it has to do with map calculations I suspect. And calcultating trade routes.

[kentonio]

Originally posted by Sim
Yes, it's VERY disappointing.

I've spent the last four days making a historical scenario (Imperialism in 1903) on the huge 362x362 world map, about 12 hours each day.

When I loaded the unfinished version, it took about 5 minutes at startup to load - so far, so good.

But now, after I've configured the 24 civs (set which techs and money they have, renamed them), when I try to load it, it has not finished loading after one hour (!) - and I've not even placed units yet !!!


Has anybody here an idea what I can do in order to prevent the last 50 hours of work on that scenario from having been useless?

There is only really one option and that is to leave it to load fully and then save the game immediately on starting. Then when you release the scenario you can provide the savegames with it. We were forced to do this with SOE due to a 5-8 hour loading time (seriously). It seems people dont really mind downloading and using a savegame as long as they get to play the scenario.

[mathgoulet]

PC speed doesnt affect much at some point. I just upgraded and I havent seen any big difference in the loading time of a huge scenario. Most of the time it matches the loading time said in forums.

Has it has been said, traderoutes and culture adds a lot of calculations. You can noticed the in-game freeze when you build harbors/airports or when you destroy a key road. This problem appears also when a city is captured at some place jammed with cities with a lot of culture points. It might also be because of the resource calculations. Once again, I havent seen a lot of improvement on that when I went from 1.5Mhz 256megs ram to 2.8Mhz 1Gig ram.

[Sim]

That's strange - I've just upgraded my system from a 1.4 GHz/512 MB RAM to an AMD 2500+/512MB RAM, and the speed has increased remarkably:

Initializing scenarios now takes only two thirds the time it did before, and playing has even improved more.

And I've the impression there is a "critical number" of cities: In the last scenario I made, I had begun with a lot of cities, and it took 9 minutes to initialize. So I deleted two civs and dozens of cities (30 or so), and I was not down to 7.5 minutes - but after deleting only four cities more, it was only 5 minutes.

[vmxa1]

Going from 1.4 to 1.83GH will have some impact. What was the FSB speed on 1.4, 2500+ is 333. What about the mem types?
HD types?

[Sim]

The RAM was SD DDR on 266MHz before, now it's DDR on 333MHz by Infineon.

The old processor was an AMD Athlon 1400+ on 266MHz FSB.

I didn't change the HDs.

I'm really happy that buying the new board+processor+RAM did have influence on the Civ speed, as this was the main reason for me to buy it.