Please wait a long, long time

[Nostromo]

I just got Conquests. When I build a new city, or when step on a goodie hut, the "please wait" message appears. Sometimes I have to wait 5 minutes. I'm not kidding you! Do you have the same problem? I'm playing on a standard-sized map.

BTW, I have a Toshiba laptop with an AMD 400 CPU with 192 ram. I know, it's a compusaurus, but Civ 3 ran fine on it.

[Antrine]

...a compusaurus, you're screwed. This game is unforgiving, it eats resources and looks for more. Sorry.

[Nostromo]

Yeah, I was amazed how much hard disk Civ 3 and Conquests gobbles up: more than 1 gig! And my HD has a 4 gigs capacity... However, according to the system requirements I should be OK. Maybe it's a direct X thing. I recently updated my display and sound card drivers, maybe it will run better.

[vmxa1]

That basically is the min requirements for the game. In practice the min levels are actually lower than the game really should have.

You are seeing that for yourself. This game is mainly cpu intensive after you have about 512MB of Ram. More ram does nothing much, but more CPU does.

The best thing is to turn of all animations, except combat. Stay on standard maps for smaller. Do not use more than 8 civ in a game.

Avoid having lots of water in the map. These will make it a bit less painful, but really a PII or AMD of 400MH is not going to work very well for games made in the last couple of years.

[Nostromo]

Damn computer games... There's always a problem. The funny thing is that it ran Civ 3 fine. Maybe they buffed up the AI in Conquests. Why does water slow down the game?

[vmxa1]

Because it leads to more harbors. Each time a city is founded or raze it will have to check all trade routes. This can be very painful.


I ran a 250x250 map with 24 civs in PTW with islands all over the place and you could see the settler animation squat for almost 2 mins late in the game on my 3.066GH system wiht 1GB mem.

With some civs eliminated or less water and hence less harbors, the trade routes are not as complex.

[Jahi]

i've had one turn take 45 minutes once. its was on the largest map, 512 cities, and a total world war broke out with the AI tearing into themselves.

This was on a 3 gig E system with 2 gigs of ram (the rest of the system config doest matter)

[Shogun Gunner]

Between porn and computer games, these two interests are powering the information age.

[player1]

I had Civ3 on 333Mhz Celeron and one thing I learned that I should never play maps greater then standard size.

In most cases pathfinding is what slows down the comp.
And when new city is build pathfinind routine is checked to see to which cities is new city connected (for trade purposes).
The greater the map, the longer the wait.

[Nostromo]

Originally posted by Jahi
i've had one turn take 45 minutes once. its was on the largest map, 512 cities, and a total world war broke out with the AI tearing into themselves.

This was on a 3 gig E system with 2 gigs of ram (the rest of the system config doest matter)

Ouch! You're patient...

[Jahi]

Originally posted by nostromo


Ouch! You're patient...

heh, well, i run two systems... one i played painkiller on between turns while waiting on civ to process. its now down to 4-5 min per turn as i slowly take over the world... there really isn't much to upgrade to at the moment to make it any faster

[player1]

It's good that ay least you have decent RAM, with my old Celeron I had just 64MB.
It is playable (I played Civ3 threee yours this way), but only if music it tuned off. Otherwise there would be constant disk-swapping.

The biggest joke in that on original Civ3 box it said that minimum reuqirements for RAM were 32MB (this was fixed on PtW and C3C boxes to 64RAM).

[Nostromo]

I played last night. The same game on the standard map. This time it was much, much more responsive. No more 5 minutes waiting time. I updated my display and sound drivers, I turned off some animations and I turned off the music. Oh, I forgot: I humiliated and destroyed the Germans and the Russians. The French are next... The Mayas will have their revenge!

[Dreadnaught]

This may be a conflict problem and not a resources problem. I had this same thing happen to me ALOT when I upgraded to C3C. I even posted about it in help and got no responses (in fact this is only my second post). Anyway, I did some checking and found that firaxis recommends that you shutdown all programs except explorer and systray and try running C3C again to see if you get these freezes.

I got them at the start of every game (founding the first city and/or taking the first goody hut). On a standard size map and at the beginning of the game, this cannot be a resource problem.

I did some experiements. The % of games that froze without any tinkering on my part was about 80-90% (extremely unplayable). I found out that the program RNAAPP was causing my problems. I shut it down and now rarely have a game freeze on me (maybe 1-2% of the time now). Also if it does happen now, it will only happen at the start of a game and will not persist for the rest of the game.

RNAAPP (remote network access application) is only a current running process on my computer after I connect to the internet. It just so happens the first things I do on my computer are internet related and then I play games if time allows. Therefore I always had this program running in the background.

If you still have this problem in a later game, shutdown all programs except explorer and systray and try again.

[Nostromo]

Before playing a game, I use a program called "End it all" to close all programs (I still use Win98). So the culprit can't be a background program. But now it seems to run fine. I don't know what did it. Maybe it was the new display and sound drivers? Or maybe it's because I turned off the music + some animations? Who knows? Thanks anyway!