Slowdown on 966Mhz PIII on Huge Maps

[[ID]KuZGuN]

Literaly unplayable? True.

I have a 1.2 GhZ AMD Thunderbird, 128 MB DDR RAM, GeForce2 GTS 32 MB... I tried playing on a huge map, with 10 civs, and in the 1800s the game got unplayable. I thought maybe it was because of my CPU... maybe the game wasn't optimized for AMDs... I tried a Pentium III 700, 128 MB machine, and to no avail the results were much worse.

With 1.2 GhZ AMD I started getting 1-3 minutes of wait time which made the game unplayable for me, but as I look here in the forums, AMD performs much better than Intel because of it's strong math processing and level1 and L2 caches start giving hits after a few minutes of playing.

The best thing would be a patch or at least a SUGGESTION from Firaxis. The next best thing, if you can buy a DDR AMD 1500+ and 256+ system. I beleive it would make the game a bit more playable, at least not 15 minutes. The last best thing is DON'T play on huge maps. You can still play on large maps with 16 civs w/o much problems.

[John-SJ]

Originally posted by Simpleton
I doubt they will address it because Firaxis is only supporting the game to be played for upto 8 civs. If your playing with 16 civs and having trouble you might be on your own.
I can't blame them because pretty much all gaming companies don't offer their help if you've hacked the program code or changed the game rules.

Only problem is, both huge maps and 16 civs are supported right out of the box, no hacking on players part. If Firaxis doesn't adequately fix this problem for ALL P3 (and equiv. speed Athlon) users I would seriously question their commitment to the player community.

John-SJ

[ElitePersian]

Well, i bet Firaxis is already paying the price for this, i'll bet a lotta ppl arent playing the game anymore cause of the slow turns - that shows really how long some ppl have to wait in between turns.

[Cavalier_13]

Time delays....my understanding.

Well, my time delays in this game in the latter parts are only occuring in 2 occasions.........

1> When I get cultural expansion, the game takes 1 to 3 minutes to determine how much of my rival's areas I am eating into.

2> This is the killer, but ANYTIME ANYTHING that has to do with the trade network is affected, it is plain old CRAWL! I am now in 1920's and when I create an airport OR a harbour, that city takes upwards to 5 minutes to update. This also affects my rival civs since when at war, I like to destroy civs by cutting their infrastructures to the ground, effectively depriving them of special resources and luxeries. Make their cites go into unrest....but I digress. Whenever I hit a road with artillery or destroy an enemy harbour / airport, I again get a 5 minute wait.

In my experience, it has not been the moving of units. I disabled the enemy animations and their unit moves go quite quick. To test this, I stole the plans of all the civs so I knew ALL their locations (16 civs, 1921, HUGE map) and so the computer showed me every move they made.....and the actual move portion took 2 to 3 minutes total. All of this on a P2 450MHz with 512MB of RAM.

So, Firaxis, can you all look into this?

Cavalier

[The Viceroy]

Ive been reading this with some interest.. It took me back to similar problems I had with CTP2 ... If it is Virtual memory (as it was with CTP2) its a windows thing .. I found the following a great help ...

1) Remove any pictures you have on your desktop .. as it takes a load of memory/v-memory up, and only increases the problem of paging if you have to use v-memory.

2) Remove as many processes as possible. The real killer on my set with CTP was the SETI Client ... not only did it take 32Mb of my 64Mb of ram, it also seems to interfere with idle priority threads .. So remove everything but the bare explorer if you can.

3) Obvious this one, but defrag your HD !!

Even though you have 256Mb of Ram or more, Windows will page memory onto V-Mem if its not been accessed for a while (like the desktop image) .. so you can still end up using V-Mem if you have a lot of other processes handing about.

It would be interesting if somebody (as im at work) could run a monitor in the background (or use CTRL-SHFT-ESC on XP/NT/2000) and watch memory usage ... see if its leaking at all ????

Hope some of that helps.

ps.. It runs like a dream on my P4 2Ghz 256Mb .. but then, I just bought it the other day .. so haven't hammered it yet

[Blisterz]

Originally posted by RedWhiteArcher
I play 16 civs on standart only. Its quite fast that way.

How do you manage that? when i pic standard map I only get 8 civs to choose from not 16. Am i missing somthing?

[Shiva]

Originally posted by The Viceroy
It would be interesting if somebody (as im at work) could run a monitor in the background (or use CTRL-SHFT-ESC on XP/NT/2000) and watch memory usage ... see if its leaking at all ????

If it was leaking then wouldnt it finally up and crash? I know TCY had a bad memory leak that after a year of simming it would drag system resources to 21 percent free or so before crashing.

As for the turns I havnt seen an AI turn yet last over 3 minutes and 43 seconds in the 3 huge/16 player games that I have actually timed turns with full ani and sound.

Now I do get the wait.... message on my turn every once in a while (in later stages of the game) when I change production or something to that effect but the wait is maybe a minute thirty at most.

Thats on a P3 650, 386mb memory, 1 gig swap not controlled by windows, system set to server, using windows98 SE with a few registry hacks, and a near clean boot (goto start, program, accessories, system tools , system information, tools , system configuration utility, startup. Then start unchecking programs you dont want started at boot up. Its alot easier than it sounds ).


I was wondering if the people who are posting their system specs could post what OS they're using. It makes me wonder since XP already has had some problems with Civ3 maybe there is something else?

[Shiva]

Originally posted by Blisterz


How do you manage that? when i pic standard map I only get 8 civs to choose from not 16. Am i missing somthing?

If you edit your civ mod file in one of the rules you can change the max number of civs on a map. In the rules look for a tab called "world sizes".

[Robert]

The AI seems to move every unit as often as possible every turn. That takes ages.

I didn't calculate so far how long I'm waiting,
I'm reading books and magazines and I surf the internet while waiting. The bad thing though is that you have to pay attention to the game otherwise you miss any polution or disorder messages

I love the game, but the waiting time is indeed ways too long.

[ElitePersian]

Originally posted by CyberShy
The bad thing though is that you have to pay attention to the game otherwise you miss any polution or disorder messages

yeah, there should be a status box which lists which cities are in disorder, where pollution striked, and what was built in what city for every turn. that way i would actually surf the net while waiting in b/w turns.

[The Viceroy]

Memory leakages do not always show up .. especially if you go and put a 1Gb swap size and the leakage is small enough. Eg, if your leaking 1Mb per turn, and you have 256Mb of ram, of which say 180Mb was free for usage .. you would have 180 turns before you started running out of memory, and then the next 1000 turns using V-mem ... If its only a 500Kb leak, its going to be double the time ... That would explain also why it becomes painfully slow later on in the game ... a simple test to proove this ... when your game gets painfully slow, save it .. reboot .. load it, and time it again .. is it still so slow ??

It should be noted, some people have complained that their system has ran out of V-Mem .. that is usually a good indication of memory leakage.

[Shiva]

Originally posted by The Viceroy
If its only a 500Kb leak, its going to be double the time ... That would explain also why it becomes painfully slow later on in the game ... a simple test to proove this ... when your game gets painfully slow, save it .. reboot .. load it, and time it again .. is it still so slow ??

Cool, thx for the info

[Blisterz]

Originally posted by Shiva


If you edit your civ mod file in one of the rules you can change the max number of civs on a map. In the rules look for a tab called "world sizes".

Thanks a bunch

[Akaoz]

As far as I can tell it’s not memory leakage. I have tried to re-boot and the wait is still 13-14 minutes.

One poster nailed it though: The game ‘hangs’ whenever culture/trade is changed.

If anyone else wants to take a look at it I can send them a save game... BTW it takes about 10 min to load!

-Alech

Edit: and war declaration takes forever...

[Grim Legacy]

Aaah these complaints are so sweet! I was pretty much satisfied with the Civ3 performance of my sweetly clocked P3-800EB @ 1000Mhz... not that it ran like lightning in the modern era, but it _seemed_ bearable.

Upon reading this thread I know I was wrong. It runs like a drunk turtle on systems more powerful than mine! [slaps self] wake up!

So I realize I've found the perfect excuse to upgrade my PC! Yay! What better justification than: "Even Civ3, a isometric TBS game is too much for my current rig, I _really_ need to upgrade ASAP."

No more guilt feelings.