How is it running?

[Dr Strangelove]

I have a meager PII 300 system with 64Meg RAM. Is anyone else playing Civ 3 on a system that barely meets the requirements? If so, is the game running smoothly on such systems?

[Wexu]

I doubt it. Maybe on the small map, but I don't know.

[Urban Ranger]

My experience is that the "minimum requirements" are often overstated. In other words, there's a safety margin built-in. I think it should run fine on your system as long as you have a decent video card.

[Wexu]

Actually, minimum requirements are usually too minimum and the and the game runs on them very poorly.

[Dr Strangelove]

But has anyone tried the game on a minimum requirement system?

[Dr Strangelove]

"bump"

[Dr Strangelove]

"bump"

[General Ludd]

Video card will matter very little, it's processor speed that matters in these games, as the computer has to calculate all of those moves. I'm using a P3 500, and can do standard maps fine, large can get a bit slow mid-late game, and huge can get very slow, very quickly.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
My experience is that the "minimum requirements" are often overstated. In other words, there's a safety margin built-in. I think it should run fine on your system as long as you have a decent video card.

When was the last time you bought a game?

[Dr Strangelove]

"bump"

[DanS]

Strange: Osweld answered your question about the best you're going to get. My experience is about the same on a Celeron 500, with all animations on. If you have a flakey video card, that might slow you down.

Try it out. You should be fine. If not, then turn off all of the animations.

[Basilisk]

i've talked to ppl with a p2 333mhz (or something like that) and they hadn't had many problems...
but if it does slow down, turn off the animations, or if you ca go without sound, enter
nosound 1
into the civilization.ini file. this stops the game from even loading sound into memory.
for more info, check the 'Computer Speed' thread, at the moment it's on page 3 or 4

[Genghis John]

OK. It runs fine on my laptop: PII 266 128MB ram. The animations are a little slow, but not "jerky" and the turn time is reasonable on medium map, 5 civs. (I haven't tried it out on anything higher).

I think the key to low end systems is that more ram is better than a fastr CPU.


It also runs fine on my workstation (don't tell anyone!) Dual Athlon MP's.

Hope this helps

GJ

[Sikander]

I have a PII 350, but the game just crashes immediately to the desktop. I guess it doesn't like my video card, though it would be nice to hear from the program itself. It would also have been nice if the game disk installed the proper version (8) of directx like the manual said it would, it took over an hour to download it over my dial up connection, and perhaps another hour to locate and download the latest drivers for my hardware, all in a vain attempt to get Civ 3 to run on my desktop.

I have run it successfully on my laptop, but the game is frankly kind of boring, and after the initial excitement (about 24 hours of playing) I am putting it away and going back to SMAX, which has been my favorite game for over two years now. Civ 3 doesn't hold a candle to SMAX, and I wouldn't recommend purchasing it unless you do not already own one of the earlier Civ games.

[Simpleton]

I am playing it on a 233 MMX and it runs fine. However, I have only played on the tiny and small maps. I also turn off all the animations to speed the game up. The only thing that I find quite slow is the map scrolling but otherwise everything is pretty tolerable. Luckily I am getting a new system soon so I'll be able to play on larger maps which I am assuming would grind my system to a halt if I played Civ3 on it.