16 civ games ARE WAY too slow!

[Fayadi]

Originally posted by Simpleton


(1) Why can't you be civil? I'm just giving my opinion pal...Sheez.
(2) I have no problem with improving the game. Go for it. My point is that I don't think making the game compatable for 16 civs is a priority for Firaxis. They have other things that I think they will address first such as making the game multiplayer or making more scenarios.
(3) I don't think Firaxis will do it because in my opinion it would result in a major rewrite of the game not in a simple patch. This is something that Infogrames would probably not put up the money for. They would first have to do some major optimization of the program code and then develop some new graphical screens to display all the civ's.
(4) As I've said before Firaxis designed the game for 8 civs. If they wanted the game to run well with 16 civs they would have designed it to run but they didn't. Just because you can alter the game rules to play with more than 8 civs doesn't mean it has to work. You could probably change many things in the game but I believe it would be unfair to fault Firaxis when it doesn't work.

For the record: I am not against criticism of the game and I would love for the game to support 16 civs.

I am talking to Kolyana not u because he asked me not to whine and said Civ 3 was a perfect game.So no misunderstand ok?

[Peets]

Originally posted by cassembler
Jeez people! I run 16 civs on a tiny, small, or regular map on an OVERCLOCKED PII 333!!! It runs fine.
Sure, huge maps are um, huge, and yeah, there's lots of thing going on. Small maps are inherently shorter as far as the length of game is concerned.

can you play with 16 civs on a tiny map?
I noticed that my brother couldn't but I may be wrong here...

[N. Machiavelli]

Originally posted by Peets


can you play with 16 civs on a tiny map?
I noticed that my brother couldn't but I may be wrong here...

Not without manually changing it in the editor.

[Peets]

Originally posted by N. Machiavelli


Not without manually changing it in the editor.

Thanks

So, will this give any effect to the game?
Like some bad things/issues?

[Kolyana]

Couple of things ...

1) My post was *SO* much tongue in cheek, my tongue is now hurting. I was under the impression that the footnotes would make that obvious

2) And perhaps more importantly, please add a little more estrogen to the 'he' references ... slip in a 's' and you may be slightly closer to something I like being referred to as

[N. Machiavelli]

Originally posted by Peets


Thanks

So, will this give any effect to the game?
Like some bad things/issues?

Not really, but expect the game to be REALLY cutthroat for the precious-few resources available. 7 civs on the same tiny continent will remain in perpetual war over the single iron-patch for eternity. Apart from that, you may wish to experiment/tweak with the 'distance between civs' option in the editor as well, ensuring that if the map you play on has islands, not every civ will be on the SAME island to start. Otherwise you will see a colonization race for the other island that makes the European Imperial age look like a kindergarden spat.

[Peets]

Originally posted by N. Machiavelli


Not really, but expect the game to be REALLY cutthroat for the precious-few resources available. 7 civs on the same tiny continent will remain in perpetual war over the single iron-patch for eternity. Apart from that, you may wish to experiment/tweak with the 'distance between civs' option in the editor as well, ensuring that if the map you play on has islands, not every civ will be on the SAME island to start. Otherwise you will see a colonization race for the other island that makes the European Imperial age look like a kindergarden spat.

Actually I would love to play a game where you have to struggle for some resource, could be fun
I will check the distance between civs, thanks again

[Akka]

Re: 16 civ games ARE WAY too slow!

Originally posted by Fayadi
I got Pentium4 1.3 ghz with 128 memory RDRAM pc-800 400 mhz!
MY MEMORY IS 400 mhz u know!Thats the most popular ram i bought in march!Guess what 16 civ games on huge map are way too slow.In early games of course it looks fast but in 800 + ad
for one turn it took 1/2 minutes.Well i never really measure the time it's very long to be considered "a computer game"
So i normally play 8 civs game!Those who plays 16 civs game really will vomit when all the other civs got large empires already!it is too long !!to be considered a game!!

Just because I'm a quite nitpicking guy : your memory does not work at 400 MHz, it works at 100 MHz quad-pumped.
Just because I'm an AMD fanboy : throw your P4 and get an Athlon. Twice cheaper and 50 % more powerful. Just can't understand how people can buy P4, they're the worst pile of crap since the Cyrix P+.

Back on topic :
The slowdow is most probably due to high number of "nodes" in the map when, later in the game, most of the tiles are covered with roads. Which means that's the size of the map that is the problem. Try a large or standard map to see if it's better.

[Simpleton]

Originally posted by Fayadi


I am talking to Kolyana not u because he asked me not to whine and said Civ 3 was a perfect game.So no misunderstand ok?

No Problem!

[cassembler]

The Peets-meister:
So, will this give any effect to the game?

[This pertains to tiny/ small map w/ 16 civs]
Yeah. I find myself doing some things differently.
1) BUILD WARRIORS AND ARCHERS ASAP!!! You will HAVE to conquer at least your closest neighbors to clear some growing room. I find that on tiny maps, I don't even build settlers for many, many turns.
2) Go for the capitals. You can keep them if you want to.
3) As soon as you're in a secure position (have your own island or whatever) focus hardcore on culture. Keep your defenses up.
4) From that point, you can pretty much apply any strategy you want to.

Oh yeah, you can probably play 3 or 4 games in the same time it takes someone to post a complaint about how long it takes to play a gigantic map w/ 16 civs.

[Fayadi]

Re: Re: 16 civ games ARE WAY too slow!

Originally posted by Akka le Vil


Just because I'm a quite nitpicking guy : your memory does not work at 400 MHz, it works at 100 MHz quad-pumped.
Just because I'm an AMD fanboy : throw your P4 and get an Athlon. Twice cheaper and 50 % more powerful. Just can't understand how people can buy P4, they're the worst pile of crap since the Cyrix P+.

Back on topic :
The slowdow is most probably due to high number of "nodes" in the map when, later in the game, most of the tiles are covered with roads. Which means that's the size of the map that is the problem. Try a large or standard map to see if it's better.

Thanks for the Athlon advice,next time i will buy it,but many ppl says Athlon isnt as stable as Pentium's do u agree?16 civ on standard map?everybody will have not much room to expand which can probably greatly slowed everybody.I will have to start enjoyinh 8 civ gmaes now.....

[Kolyana]

I am extremely pro Pentium ... but even I wouldn't (and haven't) buy the P4. For the extra money, you do not get bang for buck ... it marginally performs better than An Athlon of considerably slower clock speed.

[Louis Cyr]

I dnloaded a standard map and i modified it to play with 16 civs

The longer turns take about 15sec. and its really fun !!!

I have only 1 iron and 2 coals so i have to do a lot of diplo and trade!

1894 and still 14 civs remains, my best civ game ever !!!



Of course i'm the red one

Happy holidays ... and happy civing everybody !

[Akka]

Re: Re: Re: 16 civ games ARE WAY too slow!

Originally posted by Fayadi


Thanks for the Athlon advice,next time i will buy it,but many ppl says Athlon isnt as stable as Pentium's do u agree?16 civ on standard map?everybody will have not much room to expand which can probably greatly slowed everybody.I will have to start enjoyinh 8 civ gmaes now.....

Athlon being less stable than Pentium is false. It comes from the early days of AMD when its K6 had EXTREMELY LOW compatibility problems (and I insist on the "extremely low").
The only inferior thing on Athlon is their heat, they do tend to produce more heat than Intel processor. But for all the rest, Athlon just CRUSH Intel's processors in nearly all ways - and especially in bang for bucks. A P4 2GHz is less powerfull than an Athlon XP 1800+ and cost about three times more.

You CAN play with 16 civ on a medium map. Everybody will walk on the foot of everybody else, but it's such a mess than it's a huge fun
Many small wars (as there is not big enough empire for big wars until late in the game), and world wars are just apocalyptics
I strongly advise this to everybody

[John Cholewa]

CPUs and performance and reliability and stuff....

Fayadi: To expand on Akka's words....

The K6 didn't really have anything in the way of bugs or reliability problems. The only example I can, in fact, think of was a most interesting Windows 95 glitch involving a timing loop that used the x86 LOOP instruction. Basically, if the processor's execution of LOOP was too fast, then Win95 would hang on boot. Although the P6 (PII/PIII), at the time, was faster overall than the K6, the K6 had a much faster LOOP instruction (I believe that K6 could do LOOP in one clock cycle, whereas the P6 took several cycles, which is one of the reasons why the P6 was easier to ramp in frequency). The really ironic thing there is that the Pentium 4 experiences this problem at frequencies around, if I recall correctly, 800MHz or above and the K7 experiences it at 1.10GHz and above, but Windows 95 doesn't really exist anymore, so the point is moot.

The K5 had some sort of incompatibility with Windows NT 3.x. Cyrix's M1 (6x86) had a few incompatibilities. The Pentium Classic had a couple particularly annoying bugs that threatened compatibility (f00f and that division one come to mind). But pretty much after that there haven't really been many issues *caused by* the processor. The Athlon and Duron have no intrinsic problems. The Pentium III and Pentium 4 have no intrinsic problems. Hell, even the VIA and Transmeta processors are pretty much on the ball!

Anyway, instabilities and reliability problems are usually the domain of the motherboard. You can get a fantastic P4-based system that will crap out on a moments notice, and you can get an amazing Athlon XP box that only boots successfully on Tuesdays, if the moon is present. As a couple examples: The Intel chipsets (for the P4) have a most interesting AGP-oriented problem. Halfway through the life of AGP, Intel tried to make a change to the spec, but the change was done in a rather half-assed way. Older AGP cards that run on a higher voltage will apparently cause the i850 and i845/i845D boards to smoke and die. The motherboard assumes that higher voltage AGP cards will have a special notch (I think it was that) which prevents the card from being put into the motherboard. But cards made on the original AGP spec obviously would not have this kludge. So, that's one of those "suck" things, though it's not really crucial, since nobody in their right mind would use a cpu from 2001 with a graphics card from 1999. On the other side of the spectrum, VIA seems to have an on-again, off-again problem with their chipset design. Some of their chipsets (like the KT133 and the KT266A) are reasonably solid, while others (the KT266) are barely workable. ALi had had similar problems, which is too bad since they laid first claim to mobile DDR SDRAM chipsets. SiS, beyond all reason, has an insanely stable, reliable, cheap chipset that powers an ECS motherboard (~$60!) which is nearly top notch in speed and comes with integrated LAN. That's their SiS735 for the Athlon and Duron families. SiS's P4-based 645 chipset is supposed to be rather good, as well, and some reviews put it at the very top of the Pentium 4 chipset performance spectra, partly due to the use of 333/166MHz DDR SDRAM. I should note on the side that the AMD760MPX chipset has a rather bizarre problem in its first revision that prevents it from properly using USB1.1 devices (the 760 and 760MP, and likely future revs of the 760MPX, will likely not have this problem).

Hrm. This message is too long. Suffice it to say, cpus don't break computers (unless you do really stupid things like pulling off heatsinks while the computer is operating), other components (and especially *combinations* of otherwise reliable components) do.


With respect to performance: Characteristics differ from program to program and game to game, so it's hard to tell what the best architecture might be for civ3. But if you were to take a general mix of games and applications, where most apps aren't particularly optimized for today's processors but a healthy percentage are optimized for the Pentium 4, the following comparison would come out:

The 1.20GHz "Thunderbird" Athlon performs roughly on par with, or perhaps slightly higher than, a 1.50GHz Pentium 4. I won't go into too much detail into why this is the case, since I've probably already written far too much and will crash the Apolyton BBS upon hitting "Submit Reply", but the most simplistic reason is that the instructions usually take about twenty to twenty-eight cycles to go from the beginning of the P4 to the end, whereas they take between ten and fifteen cycles to traverse an Athlon or Duron -- this difference makes the P4 achieve much higher clocks, but it causes poor "per clock" performance.

Anyway, the "Palomino" Athlon XP is faster than the Thunderbird/Athlon at like clock due to a few internal changes, and so the Athlon XP is given a speed number which allegedly corresponds to which frequency Thunderbird it performs like. A 1.33GHz Athlon XP is called an "Athlon XP 1500+", although, in my opinion, it performs closer to a 1.40GHz Thunderbird. On the plus side, though, that XP 1500+ will outperform (if I recall my numbers correctly) a 1.70GHz Pentium 4. The Athlon XP 1800+ is *generally* superior to the 2.00GHz Pentium 4 in performance, and the 1900+ cranks it up a bit beyond that.

Starting in January, Intel will be unveiling a newer version of the Pentium 4 known as "Northwood". The Northwood/P4 is built with a finer silicon etching pen (this isn't actual terminology -- I'm just using words like this to make it easier to understand visually) which makes it smaller so that electrons can go back and forth through it more quickly (hence, it will go to higher frequencies). Additionally, Northwood has more "cache" memory attached to the processor. I'd like to wait for final numbers, but the preliminary performance tests suggest that Northwood adds some per-clock performance over the classic P4. My estimation is that the Athlon XP 1900+ and the 2.00GHz Northwood/P4 will be pretty much equivalent in performance. The Northwood should be available, though, at 2.20GHz in January, and the Athlon XP 2000+, expected at around the same time, will likely be slightly slower overall. So the Pentium 4 will be, for the second time in its life so far, the fastest processor on the planet (it was the fastest for a week or two back in August or September, if I recall correctly). The only point of hesitation is that it is very expensive compared to the Athlon XP, primarily because from 1980 all the way to 1993 and most of the years between 1994 and 1999, Intel has had the fastest chips, so they've built up a very strong brand recognition. You pay a premium for the name (though not as much as you would have had to, say, last year).

Oh, the other bit: If you get the Pentium 4, make sure that you do *not* get it with PC133 memory. Do *not* get it with the regular i845 chipset, because that takes several speed grades off the performance of the Pentium 4. Any other chipset is reasonable, though the best options are the i850 (though it's more expensive than the other options), SiS645, or VIA's P4X266A (I think that's what it's called -- I vaguely recall that they did their 'A' thing to what used to be called the P4X266).

Okay, that's it. I just wanted to make my first post at least slightly impressive, so I let myself forget to stop writing. ^_^

-JC

http://www.jc-news.com/