Middle Ages conquest painfully slow!

[MyOlde]

First off: my machine has Pentium 3 933 MHz.

The epic game always runs very smoothly and the calculations at the end of each turn are always reasonably quick.

BUT I'm not sure I'm going to play the Middle Ages scenario again after this experience. Quite early on in the game the time between turns became agonizingly slow. My only conclusion is that it's the number of civs the game has to process each time.

For what it's worth, I am England and now at turn 136 of 204 with a current victory point total of 28,005 out of 30,000, thanks to picking up 2 (I think) relics in addition to my own. The scenario is fairly fun for awhile and would be moreso if I didn't have to wait forever at the end of each turn.

It also took TWO armies in the galleys along with 11 swordies, two spearmen, and a horseman (not sure what I was thinking there) in as many curraghs to bring down Jerusalem -- and that wasn't on the same turn. I also lost one of my armies. It took two attacks! And what a pain it was sailing all those dopey little boats all the way there.

I've abandoned Jerusalem after making peace with the Abassids and am taking the remains of my forces home to London and will spend the rest of the time attacking the continent and trying to knock off kings to get the rest of the points.

But the main reason for this post is to complain about the huge length of time between turns. If the other Conquests are like this one, I'll probably stick to the epic game.

[CerberusIV]

This one does get fairly slow about 1/3 of the way in as the AI's expand their empires. I haven't had problems with the other Conquests I have tried.

I found Middle Ages fairly tolerable even on my PIII 450 although larger than standard maps in the epic game get to be too slow around the late medieval.

[MyOlde]

Glad to hear that, Cerberus, about the other conquests. Thanks for the response.

[Dis]

yes one problem with this is the large number of civs. Once they start building cities in all the empty space- well you end up with a ton of cities. you'll see all the cities on the replay.

But you may look into your system RAM. I have a slower computer, but don't have too many problems with this scenario.

I have 256 Megs of RAM. RAM is very important for civ3. Moreso than processor speed. My computer is a P3-700.

My main problem with this scenario is the time it takes to load a game. This is good because it causes me not to reload after some bull**** battle results (like my beserkers losing against archers with a defense of 1 ).

Loading save games take a while, but the time in between turns doesn't seem too bad. It isn't instaneous of course. It does take 10 to 20 seconds at worst- though I haven't actually timed it- I'm not the best judge of time when I'm playing civ3- hence why I stay up till 5 AM without relizing it

[Panzer]

I'm currently playing this scenario and sofar the turntime is quite reasonable, even though the AI has settled all available land. I'm playing on a PIII 1000 Mhz with 256 RAM, so I think RAM is indeed the key. But then again, I'm used to playing on huge maps with 19 civs, so maybe my senses have become blunted and I think that what most people would find agonizingly slow is a nice fastpaced game.

[MyOlde]

Thanks for the replies. I have 256 RAM as well. I guess I'm just not used to the long wait. I think, Diddident, it's much more than 20 seconds although I never got round to timing it myself. More like 30-40 secs, I would have guessed.

Anyway, it's enough to spoil a nice scenario for me. I don't think I'll bother playing it again. (I completed it late yesterday afternoon by knocking off a French city and a few of her knights. That gave me enough points to put me over the top.)

[CerberusIV]

It does seem that 256MB RAM is actually the minimum for a reasonable game speed.

Is there a memory management problem with C3C? When I exit the game after an hour or two playing it takes ages and seems to be clearing temporary files off the HD. PTW used to do this until one of the patches (1.14?), then it stopped and seemed to play faster. Is there something here they need to fix?

[pvzh]

I have P3-750 128Mb RAM no problem; runs just fine. About 30 s in between turns, but I have show moves, animate battles and all pop-ups enabled (I am getting like 10 every turn now: AI's declare wars, sign alliances and switching wonders like madmen), so it is hard to tell what is "pure" speed of AI processing time. It takes a while to load a save though.

The only problem I had: once, while cycling through cityscreens with arrows, I got a lag like 10 s between clicks: that was because free space on the swap drive fell low (like 20 Mb). Quit game, cleared C:\WINDOWS\TEMP, and everything works fine again.

[G'Kar]

Originally posted by CerberusIV
It does seem that 256MB RAM is actually the minimum for a reasonable game speed.

Is there a memory management problem with C3C? When I exit the game after an hour or two playing it takes ages and seems to be clearing temporary files off the HD. PTW used to do this until one of the patches (1.14?), then it stopped and seemed to play faster. Is there something here they need to fix?

I have a P4 1.5Ghz with 256mb Ram and the game runs fine - max 15 second wait on large maps. But I do notice that after closing C3C if I go to run something else (like internet explorer) it takes quite a bit for the new program to open up. Strange.

[MyOlde]

Cerberus & G'Kar: I experienced something similar on closing PTW, except I would get a "Not enough memory" message so I couldn't do anything else but shut down and restart. Didn't occur to me to wait awhile for it to go away. Since installing C3C, it's happened only once, I think.

pvzh: I have all that stuff enabled, too. I suppose that slows things down, does it? But I don't want to give anything up. I just won't play Middle Ages again.

[pvzh]

pvzh: I have all that stuff enabled, too. I suppose that slows things down, does it? But I don't want to give anything up. I just won't play Middle Ages again.

It does because you need to close pop-ups (10 pop-ups 4-5 s or even more if you read them), drawing units and animation is very time consuming because it takes seconds to resolve visible combats instead of milli- or micro- (?) seconds to resolve invisible combats. 10 combats that are animated already take 10 s if not more no matter what machine you are using. During animated combat computer is just animating these two units and time of animation is set.
Another factor is calculation of trade routs: it is a killer on huge maps with lots of cities even on high-end machines. However, here it is not likely a problem, I do not recall much lag when my harbours are built or when I destroy a harbour in attack.

[Dis]

I heard that using Windows 98 or 98 SE causes memory problems after closing Civ3:conquests, but this is not an issue with XP. I'm not sure about that, as I run 98SE, and it does take a little while to open something up after civ3 is closed. but usually not more than a minute.

As for the time between turns, I do keep animate battles on, I don't mind watching those (that's why I have them on), so I don't really count that as wasted time. Keeping track of which of my units are being attacked is important to me, and I like to keep tabs about anywarare near my units as well as that lets me know what kind of forces the ai has near my territory.

Although my playstyle may be different from you all alls. Esp. in this scenario. Being as I can't build cities or pop huts, I don't have to many units floating around expect those engaged in direct warfare.

The only time I count against the game is when there is time passing in between turns and no action is happening that I can see. I don't count popups as time in between turns, as those city popups happen at the start of my turn.

[CerberusIV]

I was using 98 but upgraded to XP a few months ago.

Middle Ages is the only Conquest I notice slowing down. Sengoku runs OK, presumably there are fewer cities and units overall. The two I haven't tried yet are Napoleonic Europe and WWII in the Pacific.

[Dis]

Napoleon also has a lot of cities and civs as well. That one is a little slow as well iirc. I haven't had problems with Sengoku, but I thrashed everyone before they got too big

[Jaguar]

Sengoku, Middle Ages, and Napoleon all can get incredibly slow. The rest are pleasantly fast-moving.