How in the world do you play a map with more than 7 civs?

[Dis]

ahh it works. Thank you.

Now for 32 civs on a 362 X 362 Earth map. Wish me luck.

looks like I'll need it. It's already like 5 seconds between turns. Although I have several windows open right now.

[Last Conformist]

You won't need so much luck as immunity to boredom ...

[Dis]

I've been hooked. Although that hard part is getting back into the game after I stop for the night.

But I've been playing for a while.

check this out. See the lower left map.

The only bad thing about maps this size (aside from turn waiting time) is you can't tell the colors apart in the lower left map. It's just a jumble of white dots

[MrWhereItsAt]

Only 13 hours later and you;re that far into it?!

So how is the slowdown going, and on what system dare you attempt this?

[Shogun Gunner]

Impressive.

Those white dots (colors in the mini map) will become clearer when civs start getting "voted off the island"

[Mad Bomber]

There is way too many cities on that map!

Personally I perfer El-Mency's 330X 328 map.

If I am not mistaken its should be the Inca in the lower left corner

[Vince278]

Great going. I'm in awe over the appearent horsepower of your hardware.

I'd like to be able to finish a 362x362 32 civ game but after hardware the next issue that kills me is the 512 city limit and turn processing time. I wonder how much time you are running into now?

[Dis]

Originally posted by MrWhereItsAt
Only 13 hours later and you;re that far into it?!

So how is the slowdown going, and on what system dare you attempt this?

yeah I guess it's been about 13 hours. maybe less.

The turn time still seems long. But I'm impatient and have low attention span.

I have 512 Gigs of Ram. An Athalon 2600 + processor. And a Radeion 9600 XT video card.

I haven't timed the turns, but they probably take a minute now. that includes the time after my city production come up, and I change city production. After I do that, it still takes like 30 seconds before I can start moving my units.

India is right on my ass in Tech. I haven't figured out why. They were slow to expand. But they have some cool cities on the rivers. Of course so do I. I put many cities on the rivers in China. but my production rocks. I should be able to get a space ship victory. I don't think I'll get a culture victory.

I should try a diplomatic victory. That will be faster. I have never done that. I suspect you just have to gift all the other civs to bribe them. Is it that easy?

I haven't had a chance to play. I'm working. And I work 11 hours a day. I like to give myself a large window of time to play Civ3. Because once I start, it's hard to stop.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Dissident
Because once I start, it's hard to stop.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Dissident
I have 512 Gigs of Ram.

That's something I seriously doubt.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Why do you doubt, Sir Ralph? Just that you think it would take more than that?

And if that is all true, Diss, I could just about hope to try this - my laptop is a 2400 or 2600+ (can't remember and too lazy to take the 2 secs to click on the right window ), but I do only over 1/2 - 3/4 the RAM. And I'm sure the GFX card makes zilch difference.

I haven't had a chance to play. I'm working. And I work 11 hours a day. I like to give myself a large window of time to play Civ3. Because once I start, it's hard to stop.

13 hours civving, 11 hours working... yep, that's a day all right.

[Mad Bomber]

MrWhereItsAt:

Dissident origionally wrote

I have 512 Gigs of Ram.

512 Gigs would have more RAM than most mainframes and a few of the older supercomputers. Its an obvious typo by Dissident, he means MB's.

[Dis]

Imagine how fast Civ would run with 512 gigs of RAM

Actually someone (sorry can't remember who) was saying processor speed is more important.

I keep most my processor pretty free. Except for Zone alarm. I should shut that down and see if I have any improvement. Other than that, I don't run any other programs- expect for Windows XP of course.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Dissident
Actually someone (sorry can't remember who) was saying processor speed is more important.

It is. The CPU crunches the numbers, the RAM just holds them. Faster CPUs can crunch numbers faster and more RAM can hold more results. When you run out of RAM space your CPU results get swapped to the harddrive which slows you down.

[Harovan]

Of course I knew it's a typo. Just wanted to tease Dissident.

It's how Vince278 said. The speed of an application depends on memory size only if you have less physical memory than the application demands. In this case, a part of the data to be helt in memory is temporarily stored on the mass storage device (harddisk). If you notice, that your HD constantly works during a turn, it's time to increase your physical memory.

If you already have all the memory the game demands, more memory won't make the game much faster anymore. In this case, increasing processor speed will have more effect. For instance, let's assume, a game needs 768 MBs of RAM (neglecting the need of the OS, which is however large). It probably will run slow with 512 MB, very slow with 256 MB and might not even start with only 128 MB. But it won't matter anymore, if you have 768 MB, 1 GB or 2 GB.