A Lie Revealed: Slowdown Bug

[Capt Dizle]

There are two versions of Firaxis explanations going around about the cause of slowdown in the game:

1. Caused by advanced AI pathfinding
2. Caused by culture calculation and map redraw

Some might want us to believe its # 1 but it is almost exclusively #2

Proof:

Once slowdown starts it occurs on exit of city screen during player turn...this is because the culture routines are triggered every time you access it...

No units are moving at this point are they?

Culture, the most despised game concept ever implemented, is the cause of this game breaking flaw.

Firaxis has no choice but to rework the game and remove all aspects of culture so as to restore fun to the genre.

[Worthingtons]

I agree that the game needs to be sped up, but culture shoudnt be abolished.

[Capt Dizle]

You can have borders without culture, what do you need culture for?

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by jimmytrick
You can have borders without culture, what do you need culture for?

what a set up. but...pass...

seriously, I don't know what you're talking about, slow down after exiting the city screen? It only slows down for me between turns, and only then when there are hundreds of units on a huge map.

Originally posted by jimmytrick

Firaxis has no choice but to rework the game and remove all aspects of culture so as to restore fun to the genre

again I'm sure they'll fix that now that YOU have brought it to their attention!

[Aeson]

I've noticed unit (usually workers) movement as the main cause of slowdowns in my games. When manually moving my workers around on Huge railroaded maps, often 1 worker will take 2 or 3 seconds to move 30+ tiles. I've had waits of up to 10 seconds occasionally for a single worker to move. Usually by this time the AI are almost non-existant, and nothing else causes a slowdown at all. Even with my workers automated, they are by far the most time consuming portion of each turn. This is of course with all animations and show movement options turned off.

What culture routines are you talking about? I don't understand why the game would be doing any processing that deals with culture while entering or exiting the city screen, other than to display the culture value. That function shouldn't cause any noticeable slowdown. I would think the slowdown you are seeing upon entering/exiting the city screen is mostly graphical in nature.

[Capt Dizle]

It is graphical in a sense but it is tied into culture. The borders are drawn based on culture and its a series of mathematical calculations based not only on the culture of an individual city but all surrounding cities. Essentially, every time you or the AI does anything to a city it triggers a check of the culture ratings of every city on the entire map and this is done many times each turn thus the increased time based on the number of cities not necessarily based on map size (except more cities on larger maps) and it has nothing to do with movement which is separate and less important (because its less crippling) issue.

[Ãœber KruX]

let's not go into the culture sucks thing

let's go into how military occupation should push back borders

[Capt Dizle]

Aeson, you are referring to the railroad bug, what are the specs of your computer.

[Aeson]

1.33GHz T-Bird/512MB RAM/ATI Radeon 8500

In my last Huge map game, worker (~500 of them) movement accounted for about 15 minutes per turn near the end of the game. Everything else combined maybe took a minute to process. This isn't counting the time I spent manually setting builds, which took a few minutes depending on how many cities had completed their previous build.

I don't understand why you think that all the cultural borders are checked every single time you exit a city screen. Nothing you can do in the city screen is going to change the culture for that turn. There would be no purpose to doing the calculations at that time. I'm not saying it's impossible, useless calculations have been known to crop up in software before, but highly unlikely that two such unrelated processes would be linked.

[Capt Dizle]

Your config is powerful enough to blow through what I am talking about. What you are experiencing is not as important because few folks are ever going to endure this mess long enough to get to the huge map 500 worker level. But it should be fixed.

What I am lamenting is exactly what you say it is...there is no purpose to the culture calculations being done in this manner, but they are, and this slowdown affects folks on the lower end of the computing power spectrum. Folks with the amount of juice you have don't see this as a problem at all.

It might be unlikely but it is happening.

[DrFell]

When you exit the city screen it redraws the map, the culture routines might be accessed then to display the borders.

[Capt Dizle]

Right.

[notyoueither]

Which version(s) of Windows for those experiencing slow downs?

I have far less than Aeson. No significant speed problems for me. I do get the lag for a sec or so when exiting city screens from time to time. No big deal for me.

I'm using ME on the comp that plays civ3.

Salve

[Aeson]

Well, the cultural borders do have to be redrawn quite often. Do you experience the same delays while scrolling? Each time you move the focus of the map, the cultural borders on screen need to be redrawn as well. It would stand to reason that this process is the same as when coming from the city screen, or any other screen for that matter.

[Capt Dizle]

No it does not occur when scrolling. Scrolling is perfectly smooth.
This points to less than optimal code. The routines are triggered when dealing with cities. There lies the problem.