Poor Performance

[Brody]

Hi,

I am a long time Civ player, but am new to the forum. I submit this question with due respect to the forum members. If it has been dealt with already in another thread, I apologize for raising the issue again.

When Civ III came out, I owned a P3 533 MHZ machine with a flaky graphics chip. I played my first game on a huge map with the maximum number of civs. As the game progressed through the 1800s, turns started to take an awful long time for the AI (five minutes or more). I assumed that the map was too large with too many civs for my machine to handle.

Now I have a new machine - a P4 1.6 GHZ with 512 MB RAM and a Geforce 3 Ti. I fired up a new game, this time on a huge map with only 10 other civs. Much to my dismay, turns are starting to take three or four minutes for the AI to do its thing (it's around 1900). This is frustrating - I would think that my machine could handle this game better.

Any suggestions? Again, I'm sorry if this issue has been dealt with already.

Thanks,
Brody

[Todd Hawks]

Unfortunately you can't do anything about the pure prozessor time used but what you can do is turn off some/all of the animations and/or shown moves in the preferences menu.

This won't help with the time it takes to calculate the AI and pathfinding and such but if you are staring at the screen for 5 minutes watching every single unit move around it will help.

Btw: Civ3 is no 3D game so the graphics card doesn't really matter.

[SpencerH]

There are lots of posts like this. Ethylred usually has a list of things that can be done. Do a search for his name and the prroblem.

[Brody]

Thanks

Todd,

Thanks for the reply. If you have the time, I've got one follow up question.

Why does Civ III slow down so much on a reasonably new machine (P4, 512 MB RAM)? I realize the short answer is that as civilizations expand and engage other civs, the processor has a lot more to deal with. Still, I must admit that I'm not a huge fan of the game now that one of the most attractive features - the ability to play with more civilizations on a very large map - becomes impractical just as the action picks up. It's disappointing because the AI recently launched a very clever attack on me - one that left me scrambling to defend myself. One moment, I was absolutely in awe over the AI's efficiency and its capacity for strategic warfare. 15 minutes later I had so much time between turns that the game isn't worth playing. Perhaps slow performance is the price we must pay for a solid AI.

Thanks again for your help,
Brody

[alva]

do you use standard huge btw? or the max allowed
256*256 because the latter was/is not really supported by fireaxis. It was more or less put in on popular demand
btw: 1, it has nothing to do with homy civ's you"re playing, o,ly size matters
2, the more RAM the better (this should really help, as i understand it, civ is kinda wastefull in this departent, it tends to creta huge swapfiles wich slows everything down.

have fun

[zulu9812]

One of the things I found to take a long time during turns is showing all the automated workers - but you can turn this off in preferences. I have a 750 P3 with 128 RAM and I don't really notice any great drag at the end of turms - so try unchecking "Show our automated actions" in preferences.

[Brody]

Originally posted by alva848
do you use standard huge btw? or the max allowed
256*256 because the latter was/is not really supported by fireaxis. It was more or less put in on popular demand
btw: 1, it has nothing to do with homy civ's you"re playing, o,ly size matters
2, the more RAM the better (this should really help, as i understand it, civ is kinda wastefull in this departent, it tends to creta huge swapfiles wich slows everything down.

have fun

Thanks for the reply. I'm playing with the standard "huge" map. I did not modify the setting.

As far as RAM goes, I have a decent amount (512 mb), so even wasteful games typically run fairly well. I will turn off some of the animations as a couple of people have suggested (although I think most of them are off already).

Brody

[Todd Hawks]

Well, I didn't program the game so I can't really know but from several posts by the developers it seems that pathfinding (that includes e.g. calculation of possible trade routes over sea) is a major factor in this.
So the larger the map the more there is to calculate. Apparently it doesn't matter that much how many civs there are but how big the map is.

Another factor is that the game was designed for smaller maps with only 8 civs but due to demand from fans it was upgraded to 16 civs and bigger maps (you can see this in the diplomacy screen where there are only eight civs displayed at a time).

I have a 2GHz Athlon by the way and it isn't *that* bad so I don't think it should be with your 1.4GHz rig.

I again strongly suggest to turn off some of the "shown moves". Not just the animation but the whole moves.

[Tuberski]

I have always found it strange that so many people have speed problems.

I have a 500 MHz Athlon with 128 meg. I have NEVER encountered a slowdown as long as everybody else has.

Granted I play standard, eight civs, but even on larger maps I don't have a 5 minute lag between turns.

[aebrahim]

I have a really similar configuation to the original poster's new computer. On Huge/16 Civs I've not experienced any slowdown at all.

Apart from that fact that the animate moves thing takes a long time, there is no time lag, and certainly no CPU lag. Once you switch off the animate friend and enemy moves its really quick. Not more than a 30 seconds or so maximum. Even in the late ages.

For what its worth, I'm using Windows XP. Maybe it manages memory/CPU time better than older OS' like Windows 95/98/Me.

[Ethelred]

Most the things I know of to speed the game have been mentioned. The only thing left out was to turn of any undeeded programs. Turn off all those programs in the tray and other garbage floating around. Don't play with the music on. Thats MP3 music and depending on your hardware it can eat a lot of CPU cycles.

You may want to hit CONTROL-ALT-DELETE to bring up the task manager. You only need explorer running in single player but I think you should also leave the tray running. In multiplayer you will need more stuff running. Like a firewall for instance.

My usual statement on this problem is

Don't play on huge maps.

Turning off all the animations and the music will help. I like the animations myself but I have only played a game or two on larger maps and they were chieftan games.

I do sometime hold down the SHIFT key to turn off the animation temporarily when there is nothing of interest going on. That speeds up late turns dramaticly.

Pathfinding does seem to be the problem. The algorithyms time increases exponentially with the size of the map. Twice as large map means quadrupling the time. Plus larger maps mean more units each of which must use that algorithym every time they move. Which is why the chieftan games I played weren't that bad. The AI never had very large numbers of units.

[Brody]

Thanks for the replies. I do have a number of programs running while I play Civ, so I will disable them and see what happens.

I played for a while last night and noticed that lag time between turns was about 2-4 minutes. Occassionally, it would only be 30 seconds or so. Also, I noticed that the bulk of the lag time would occur after I was notified of the construction of an improvement (or unit) in one of my cities. For instance, I would end a turn and wait a minute or so (sometimes less) for the AI's turn. Then I would be notified that a rifleman was ready in one of my cities. After that, there would be as much as two minutes of lag time before I could move on of my units. This is with all of the animations and "show move" settings turned off.

The fact that some people play on large maps and don't seem to have this problem at all, makes it more of a mystery to me.
Thanks Again,
Brody

[SpencerH]

Its not really a mystery since we know the factors that effect it : Hardware, OS, other programs running at the same time, map size, number of units, animations, music etc.

In your case with a P4 1.6MHz, you should have the juice, but not if you've got 20 different norton programs running in the background. I have two things in my taskbar, a firewall and norton virus scan (cos I have a cable modem) and I turn them off too prior to playing (especially the later turns). Re-booting can also help after sleep mode.

[Willem]

Originally posted by aebrahim
I have a really similar configuation to the original poster's new computer. On Huge/16 Civs I've not experienced any slowdown at all.

Apart from that fact that the animate moves thing takes a long time, there is no time lag, and certainly no CPU lag. Once you switch off the animate friend and enemy moves its really quick. Not more than a 30 seconds or so maximum. Even in the late ages.

For what its worth, I'm using Windows XP. Maybe it manages memory/CPU time better than older OS' like Windows 95/98/Me.

It definitely does things faster than 98. I just installed it a short while ago, and I can tell the difference. I haven't tried playing Civ on it yet though.