Slow, slow, slow turns....

[pauli]

civ2 ran on a 486. civ3 is slightly more demanding. thus, playing them on the same machine slightly skews the performance curve

[xpfusion]

I think it's no good alternative, using 8 civs and small maps. When playing civ2 I always missed a really huge world, almost impossible to fully explore, and a large number of diverse cultures and nations, like in the real world. Now finally civ3 has come a bit closer to achieving this. The huge map that can be used in civ3 is a great step forward from civ2 or any other strategy game so far, and 16 civs is a lot better than 7, (even though the real world has over 200).

To make games better and more realistic, you unfortunately have to sacrifice speed. Civ3 is probably the most complex game to date, and it's just a fact that complex games require good hardware. Now, the alternative, playing on small maps with fewer than 16 civs, is not at all appealing to me. I want complexity, huge worlds, cultures, nations, every aspect of the real world. It's annoying, of course, if a game is slow. But if we want games to develop, to become more realistic and more complex, that's what we'll have to put up with.

[pauli]

thing is, i was always pretty much happy with my civ2 maps maxed out at 80x125.... 10,000 squares. now i'm feeling cramped at 256x256, which is six and a half times bigger... and i play with fewer civs than i did in civ2!

[Whistler]

My tips for speeding up your turns

I have played a few games, and learned a few things that make this slow game more tolerable. Here's what I do now to speed up my turns in this game (haven't found a way to speed up the other civ's!). I'm running 1.16f.

1. When you build your first city, Have a meeting with the governor and set the governor to maintain city attitude for all cities, and make it the default for all cities.

2. In preferences, turn off manual and automatic moves. Turn off animations too. Personally, I want to see when the other civs get close to my territory, so I leave their moves turned on, but still turn off animations.

3. Set any scouts or wandering ships or wandering military units to explore. Don't worry about what they're doing. They will find villiages on their own, and will tell you when they get in contact with other civs. (Don't turn off "wake on xxx moves" in preferences).

4. Automate most of your workers. Keep only a few manual to build roads to cities or resources or other civs.

5. When not using military units, fortify them. Preferably in strategic places so they will be near barbarians when they arise. I keep a few active in strategic places I want to personally keep an eye on though.

6. Use the GOTO function liberally. I especially like doing this for settlers. I have them goto a place where I want a city. When they get there, they will be ready for you to build a city. Try to do this with an accompanying military unit too.

7. Use the build queue. When deciding what a city should build, hold down the shift key, and queue up what they should build. Then the governor will only bug you when the queue is empty. I have "ask for build each time" turned on, and even with this, I can usually just hit enter to agree with the next choice.

7. If you stack military units in one place (which I don't), use the right mouse button and the shift key to wake them all at once when you need them. There is no way to make them all move together though (yet?).

8. If you can stand it (I can't), zoom out (use the Z key). There is only one zoom level, and it's too far zoomed out to be useful for me, but the less scrolling around that has to be done, the better.

Once all this is done, you can spend your time with your advisors and telling your governors what to build instead of what they think should be built (which is almost always different than I want), or with other civs trading.

Any other tips?

[Travathian]

Put more memory in your computer. Civ3 eats hoards of memory as a snack.

Make use of the Ctrl-r and ctrl-shift-R to have a worker build a road/railroad from present location to selected destination.

This is especially nice when you first get railroads, cause you can use it to force work to railroad from one end of your empire to the other.

[roobin]

Ah come on !

I run a 1.4Ghz, Geforce3 & 512mb DDR - Basically the equivalent of a Mainframe 20 Years ago and a mid range 10 Years ago (Probably faster than alot of the old Mid Range Systems still in use !!)

I ran Civ2 (Large Map, all the Trimmings - loads a Civ's etc.) on a 386/20 with 8MB with NO problems.

I have yet to see ANY improvements which would Justify the additional system overheads.

Back to playing Alpha Centuri I think (& thoroughly enjoying for the umpteenth time !).

[Mike4879]

Here is my hardware information:

AMD Athlon 1200mhz 256
384MB PC133 SDRAM
ATI Radeon 64SDR AGP
Windows XP Professional (Build 5.1 - 2600)


A game with 16 civilizations on a huge map runs fine until around the year 1200-1800 AD. The game becomes progressively slower until each turn takes 5+ minutes to complete. Something totally heinous, especially when there is not much to do each turn.

The problem is only made slower on huge maps with less civilizations because it takes longer for each civilization to settle the entire world.

I have thought about upgrading my memory, but I have realized this is not the case. This is a CPU usage problem. This is very bad. It is my estimate that a 4GHZ system would be needed to cut the wait times down to tolerable levels later in the game.

If someone is using similar hardware and not experiencing this problem, please shed some light.

--Mike