My Stupid Comp

[KuriousK724]

hello everybody. I have owned Civ3 for alomst a yr now. i recently moved out and am now using an older comp. now when i play civ on the comp in my apartment, it freezes, i figured out that if i destroy half the civs in the game it won't freeze. but i am tired of playing chieftan and moved up to warlord where i can no longer dominate like i used to. so now whenever i get to about the industrial age the comp freezes...

do you guys have any ideas on what i could do to make it not freeze with out not buying another comp or moving to a smaller map? i really want to finish this game i started.

i deleted all the other games and useless crap taht was on my comp. and that only helped me to advance a couple turns. help me!

[vmxa1]

What is the OS (Windows XP or 98Se or ?). What are the specs for the system you using? Cpu speed, amount of Ram.

What are the game settings for the map? Is is std or large or Huge? How many civs? Is it lots of islands or not?

Is this CivIII at 1.29F or PTW or C3C?

If you have at least 384MB for Win9x on a 900MH pc, you should be fine if you keep the civs down and use contients or pangea maps.

The more civs and the more islands, the worse it will be due to the need to calculate trade routes every time a city is built or lost.

Huge maps with lots of civs on lots of water, is the bane of even power house rigs (I use 3.066GH).

[KuriousK724]

Hewlett-Packard
GenuineIntel Pentium(r) II Processor Intel MMX(TM) Technology
63MB RAM
38% system resources free
Windows-managed swap file on drive C (1481MB free)
Available space on drive C: 1481MB of 6137MB (FAT32)

theres my comp stats...

the game is just Civ3 v1.29... no expansions... all 16 civs, continents, warlord.... im not quite sure of the land mass. i pretty much own roughly a quarter of the land masses... it seriously takes me ten minutes to get through to my next turn....

thanks for your help

[Argos65987]

You're pretty much at the minimum requirements to run the game. Unfortunately, the only answers are the ones you probably don't want to hear (ie play smaller maps, pangea etc)

I don't even know if increasing the RAM will help because your processor is still at the minimum end.

Sorry

[KuriousK724]

oh biscuits... i might as well cry... the most interesting game ive ever played and i wont be able to finish it... i need a drink...

thank you once again for your help everyone

[vmxa1]

It should be a bit better if you play on std size maps with only 8 civs. Turn off all the animation, except for batles.

Getting at least to 128MB should help, better yet with 256. That will help with swapping.

[justjake73]

38% resources free?? Try and remove or disable some of those TSR's.

[Hagbart]

128 mb or 256 mb of ram is inexpensive. You should buy that if it's possible for you.

[KuriousK724]

ok... TSR's? what are those? im not exactly comp smart... how much does 128 or 256 usually cost? i thought the 38% was really wierd... thanks everyone

[vmxa1]

TSR are load and stay resident apps. You would not want to have anything running that is not essential.

In Win98, alt-ctrl-del will bring up the program manager. It will list all running apps. Close all that you do not need.

Look at cruicial.com or some site that will list the types of memory that your rig can use. Then see what they want for a stick.
In that PC it may be EDO and how many bays you have. Some mother boards cannot handle mixed sizes. If you have one stick of 64MB and 3 bays, you could add 2 sticks of 64MB. If you have smaller than 64, you may have to junk it and use all new. In that case two sticks 128MB should be less than 40 bucks.
Pricegrabber wil list all the places and prices.