Do you play Civ3 on a laptop?

[G'Kar]

I'm planning on buying a laptop (or notebook) pc soon and Civ performance would be important to me. Many things about laptops are quite different from desktops so I'm curious as to what experiences people have had playing Civ3 on a lap.

For instance, has anyone played it on the Intel Centrino Penium M?

Are there any display problems, especially with "widescreen" monitors?

What's the interface like if you don't have a numeric keypad? (actually, I'm thinking of getting a widescreen just because some of them have numerics)

If you could mention specific models that would be nice.

[Snotty]

I've got a dell smartstep, its a P4 2.4. I don't have any performance problems, but I don't play on huge maps anyway.

The lack of numeric keypad was a pain, but I have got used to moving my units by click-dragging to bring up the movement circle. I've got used to this now and can't really remember what using the num pad was like. I play Sim moves MP where click speed is important and I tend to be faster with my mouse than others with their keys.

I dont know about widescreen display problems, just make sure it can handle the civ3 minimum resolution (1024x??? I think).

My experience has been a very positive one . Civ anywhere, anytime. Live the dream

[vee4473]

yes, the main drawback is the lack of keypad. that almost made me hate playing on a laptop. try not using your keypad on the desktop for a while.

even click dragging with the circle isn't as nice with a laptop touchpad. but you can indeed get used to it.

[vee4473]

oh and i would mention my laptop, but it is so ancient that it wouldn't do you any good. it's a celeron 600mhz

it's a trailblazer...

[Kazzyliciouz]

i have a toshiba laptop and have no problems w/playin civ3 on it. huge maps experience some slowdown but i think thats pretty much the norm in the late game. if you didn't know, you can use the home, pgup, pgdown, end keys instead of a numeric keypad for moving units

[smellymummy]

I've played on one many times, and the biggest help i've found was to plug in a external mouse.

[SirOsis]

Originally posted by vee4473
oh and i would mention my laptop, but it is so ancient that it wouldn't do you any good. it's a celeron 600mhz

it's a trailblazer...

That is fast enough. I use a 400Mhz PII.

[Dis]

I can't imagine not using the num-pad. It's well- natural

[Plotinus]

I use a Toshiba Celeron laptop too, and it's fine. I've never played Civ3 on anything else. Moving with the mouse was a little odd at first, because I remember moving with the keypad in Civ1 on my dear old Amiga, but it's fine.

[WarpStorm]

I use a laptop and I have no major problems. I use a real mouse (spend the money and save yourself the pain of the that stupid touchpad) and there is a button to remap the keys to a numpad (not perfect, but quite usable).

[Solver]

Heh, I don't use the numpad when playing civ, usually...

On a laptop, get an external USB mouse. Touchpads are a pain in the butt, and will be even more for Civ.

Also, try to get a monitor that supports 1024x768 resolution - some laptop monitors still don't. There's a 800x600 tweak for Civ 3, but using that isn't as convenient as actually playing under a supported resolution.

[vee4473]

ah, yes...as warpstorm says..i forgot to mention that on my dell laptop, you can toggle the keyboard so that a group of letters on the right (in a somewhat square keypad like formation) can be used as a keypad. see picture

The only trouble is that the keys are a bit skewed so that takes a little getting used to and if you want to use say the "i" button for irrigation hotkey, then you have to constantly toggle on and off this function.


maybe i'm just lazy?

[vee4473]

oh, and regarding touchpads, they can be annoying for games, but I was amazed at the level of customization you can have for them for use in other applications.

such as using the touchpad software to program different zones of the pad to do different things.

I particularly like the way you can program a narrow strip along the right edge of the pad so that while browsing the web or any document, all you have to do is slide your finger down the right side of the pad and the page scrolls down.

i remember thinking that i would have to give up the mouse wheel function when using the touchpad..but no!

[vee4473]

and one last thing..sorry for the multuiple posts.

my dell inspiron is finicky when it comes to ound and video on some games.

for smac, i still can't get the sound to work, and for some games the video craps out.

maybe it's because it was an old graphics and sound chip, but i have found that on board audio and video in laptops don't behave that well all of the time for games.

maybe that's fixed for today's newer models.

[sprudl]

Civ3 runs fine on an Acer Travelmate 430 (2.66 GHz, 512 MB RAM). The resulotion is 1400x1050, which is really nice.

I don't mind missing a keypad, I just use the arrows, PgUp, PgDn, Home and End keys.