Things to do in the 2-10mins between turns

[Fidel]

Originally posted by MarkG
computers bought with firaxis' bribe money play just fine

well, some consolation for having to trample what's left of my moral and cheer on a broken game

[Pythagoras]

15 Call your girlfriend who you have neglected since the end of October.
16 Do homework.
17 Alt Tab to IM or ICQ and chat with friends
18 Dance to the exciting music in the modern era.
19 Take naps, if you sleep through each 12 minute turn you could play nonstop forever! All you need is an IV and you are set to live Civ3!

[Wrong_shui]

Originally posted by LaRusso
wrongshui, i would have reccomended masturbation, but i reckon i need not to

lol

this was suppose to be a list so u should of put a number with it.

[sachmo71]

6. Hold down the shift key. It works for me...

[Zealot]

20. Get a trained dog to press shift for you while you take a bath.
Or, you could forget the dog and use the time to take 3 baths!

Wow, 3 baths between each turn. Now that would make me a clean guy!

[homegrown]

21. Apply for Social Security. Get the denial. Appeal the denial. Win the Appeal.
22. Learn a foreign language.
23. Alt-Tab to Stronghold and work on my castle there a little more.

What matters is MAP SIZE.

See, guys, size is the most important factor.

[Wrong_shui]

ew stronghold is nasty

[darthx86]

Hmm... I have very little problem with slowdown - even in late game where 5+ rivals civs are moving all their units. It's seldom more than a minute in late game, and I always play on (at least) a large map with 5-7 opponents.

I think most of the lag time may be due not so much to map size, but how many opponent AIs you play against, including the barbarian level!

For the record, I'm on an SMP Duron (1GHz) with 512MB DDR and a 3 year old GeForce 256 DDR (the original GeForce). I've done no tweaks for CPU affinity to play the game, leaving it all up to Windows 2000 to handle. Maybe this is why mine moves so well? I'll have to install it on my wife's Tbird 800 and see how it performs...

[Johnny_Was]

Originally posted by campmajor!
Buy a DECENT computer......

What an arrogant ass...!

I have this -

P4 1.8ghz
512 MB RDRAM
GeForce 3
SB Platinum
Sony X52
all the latest drivers, blah, blah, blah...

Every other game runs fine.

This game takes FOREVER to process turns.

After the 15 Century it takes FOREVER for pieces to move around the map.

It is simply unoptimised.

TIP:

The best thing to do while waiting for the AI turns - UNINSTALL THE GAME AND PLAY SOMETHING ELSE!

have a calm day

was

[Akka]

Originally posted by homegrown
21. Apply for Social Security. Get the denial. Appeal the denial. Win the Appeal.
22. Learn a foreign language.
23. Alt-Tab to Stronghold and work on my castle there a little more.


See, guys, size is the most important factor.

Yes. Size DOES matter

[aznblader]

simply put, it's ridiculous to wait for around 5 minute per turn late game, when i run unreal tournament at 32 bit, high res, max quality at 60 frames per second. i don't care what excuses you make about "map size" or "AIs" or how you diss my "crappy system." when all's said and done, Civ III IS a 2D game. there's no excuse for me being able to play a high end, 3d game at max quality and to wait for a 2d game 5 minutes a turn. it's just sloppy coding. if they had programmed unreal tournament, and it ran at 5 minutes per frame on my same system, would you tell me to play a smaller map, or would you be pissed off at the programmers?

[Johnny_Was]

Originally posted by aznblader
simply put, it's ridiculous to wait for around 5 minute per turn late game, when i run unreal tournament at 32 bit, high res, max quality at 60 frames per second. i don't care what excuses you make about "map size" or "AIs" or how you diss my "crappy system." when all's said and done, Civ III IS a 2D game. there's no excuse for me being able to play a high end, 3d game at max quality and to wait for a 2d game 5 minutes a turn. it's just sloppy coding. if they had programmed unreal tournament, and it ran at 5 minutes per frame on my same system, would you tell me to play a smaller map, or would you be pissed off at the programmers?

Amen.

[Darkknight]

Actually maybe it's a laptop thing.
P3 633
256 RAM
8mb ATI Rage Mobility Pro

and it works fine just turned 1500ad on a huge map with 8 civs.
Less then a minute a turn.

Try pillaging all their roads taking a few of their cities then forcing them into peace again

[Darkknight]

Originally posted by aznblader
simply put, it's ridiculous to wait for around 5 minute per turn late game, when i run unreal tournament at 32 bit, high res, max quality at 60 frames per second. i don't care what excuses you make about "map size" or "AIs" or how you diss my "crappy system." when all's said and done, Civ III IS a 2D game. there's no excuse for me being able to play a high end, 3d game at max quality and to wait for a 2d game 5 minutes a turn. it's just sloppy coding. if they had programmed unreal tournament, and it ran at 5 minutes per frame on my same system, would you tell me to play a smaller map, or would you be pissed off at the programmers?

duh!
It's nothing like a 3D game. This is running to millions of operations a turn for the AI. Even a simple where do I want to move would take about 100 ops. Then there's the production and diplomacy. Don't forget it needs to read and write all these ops to RAM so it can look back at what it's just done. That calls for high-speed RAM and a lot of it. Even then it's still going to take a long time going through every unit and city and then starting over again for the next civ.
A 3D game is just a graphics engine with at most 50 units. It's all in a set path as well until an action ( like you walking within sight of an enemy) occurs. All you need for that is a decent gfx card.

[Kaesar]

Originally posted by aznblader
simply put, it's ridiculous to wait for around 5 minute per turn late game, when i run unreal tournament at 32 bit, high res, max quality at 60 frames per second. i don't care what excuses you make about "map size" or "AIs" or how you diss my "crappy system." when all's said and done, Civ III IS a 2D game. there's no excuse for me being able to play a high end, 3d game at max quality and to wait for a 2d game 5 minutes a turn. it's just sloppy coding. if they had programmed unreal tournament, and it ran at 5 minutes per frame on my same system, would you tell me to play a smaller map, or would you be pissed off at the programmers?

Gosh, you really don't understand programming and computer systems do you?

The reason you can run Unreal smoothly is because of your video card. I don't even think you can run Unreal in software mode(cpu calculates the polygons).

The mechanisms causing the slowdowns in the two games are completely different. In unreal, it is the graphics. In civ3, it is the calculation of the AI moves. The computer has to figure out where to move its units, calculate culture, recalculate borders, figure assimulation, happiness, etc, etc. On a huge map, there is likely more than 300 cites and 2000 units. That in itself is quite a lot for the cpu to process.

In Unreal, the bottleneck is the calculation of the 3d graphics, which is all handled by a specialized graphics processor unit on your graphics card, that's why you can run your 60 fps.

If it's possible to show civ3 fps, you will see that there is no slow down at all. It is the game mechanics that takes a long time to calculate.