The 1 Thing Civ NEEDS

[Inverse Icarus]

The 1 Thing Civ NEEDS, not "could be better with", or "i think this would be cool", is to be SPED UP. between turns takes to long, and the game takes forever. i dont care whats to blame, pathfinding, culture, map drawing, whatever. the fact of the matter is Marla's Earth Map is a KICKASS map, but the in bewteen turns lapse take 5 minutes in the mideval ages. i haven't even touched industrial or modern yet.

[Ming]

The speed issue is a serious problem... If you play on a small world with less civs, it's not bad at all. However... You are totally correct.

[notyoueither]

No (sorry Ming) what is needed is a P4 2.2G with 1 Gig of RAM.

I'm sorry, but Firaxis has stated that they included the mongo maps to satisfy the demand for them, EVEN THOUGH they would perform like pigs on many of what would have been good computers a year ago.

So they built at least one aspect of the game with the future in mind. What are they going to do? Reduce the maximum map size? Dumb down the path finding?

I have a Duron900 (effectively), 256M DDR, Matrox G550. Large maps work well for me. I tried Huge maps twice. They worked well too, only I don't want to go through that much territory to conquer the world.

[watorrey]

With all the complaints about the speed issue, i haven't tried a huge map yet. Though i will soon just for the experience.

PII 266 @ 300 (512 L1 cache), 224 RAM, 66MHz bus, Diamond Viper II w/ 32 meg, SB Live sound, Win98. I run seti@home when not playing and work units average about 18 hrs for me. (seti is a good way to find out how well your motherboard is tuned)

I always play large maps, usually with 7 AIs. The main waiting period for me is when i can actually see the other civs units moving. More civs = more units moving = more pathfinding.

Since i have such a low end sytem, i assume that what i see on a large map is similar to what many see on a huge map with a better sytem. Could i be right?

[Spiffor]

Civ needs plenty things (starting with a scenario editor), but not to be sped up : it was meant to handle at most large maps with 8 civs, but Firaxis wanted to please the fans, by allowing them playing on huge maps with 16 civs.
With my PII-400, I don't try to play on Marla's map, and I still hope someone will make a good earth standard or large map. I'm playing on stadard maps with 8 civs, and it works perfectly ; I can finish a builder's game in an afternoon. Speeding-up is the last thing Firaxis needs to do because the CPUs will catch up with huge maps eventually without Firaxis doing anything, as opposite to improving the AI or adding a scenario editor.

[Thrawn05]

I don't understand everyone's slow problems. I have a P3 - 550Mhz with 256MB of SDRAM.

On Marla's World Map with 10 civs, I only have a 30 second wait between turns in the INDUSTRIAL age.

Here are some suggestions that I think will help your game play.

Find the program FreeMem, with this you manually remove data from the RAM (it goes to the HD, which is Windows Virtual Memory). Before I start any game, I free up 160MB.'


The next is StartUp Cop. It prevents unwanted programs from loading when you start your computer. A must have.

Also, don't forget to do some HD cleanup. Runnning scan disk and disk cleaner before Defragging your HD is a good thing. And when you do defrag, uncheck the option to place programs where they run faster, because this will make your HD more fragmented. This will help with swap files.

I hope this has been of some help. Play On!

[Arrian]

I do wish the game didn't slow down so badly (for me) on huge maps. Large maps are generally ok, a little slow at the end. Marla's map got insane. Utterly, completely insane. 45 minute turns in the Industrial Age. The map's nice, but not that nice.

400mhz
64 MB RAM

So yeah, my computer isn't nearly top-o-the line, and the game works well on Normal Maps (aside from the fact that I did have to shut off the music, which stuttered and skipped and slowed down the game). Eventually I will cave in and get a better system and things will probably be fine. By then, they'll be up to Pentium VI or whatever... with God knows how much speed & memory.

-Arrian

p.s. I play with "friendly moves" and "animate auto moves" off. This occasionally leads to real surprise at an AI attack, but it does speed up the game.

[godinex]

True A.I. who make better units instead of hundreds of bad ones and build cities in god places... not everiwhere, and a Scenario, I mean SCENARIO Editor.

[DrFell]

Originally posted by notyoueither
So they built at least one aspect of the game with the future in mind. What are they going to do? Reduce the maximum map size? Dumb down the path finding?

Well, you could code the pathfinding and other regularly used time-consuming AI routines in assembly instead of in a high level language. Although you wouldn't notice the difference if the routine was run once, when it's run hundreds of times the slightly shorter time it would take to run could speed up things considerably.

[Inverse Icarus]

might as well throw my specs out into the fray:

athlon 1.5ghz
512 SDRAM
160 gigs of hd space (100 gig 7200 rpm - 40 gig 7200 rpm - 20 gig 7200 rpm)
Geforce 3 64
funny how i can run shooter games like Counter-Strike and Quake 3 at 70+ frames per second but i can't play civ on a huge(or marla's giga) map

[ALPHA WOLF 64]

I never have trouble with the time for AI moves but some of mine take forever to do the automated moves. I found holding the shift button will speed up the movement.

1 ghz, 512mb

[Thrawn05]

Let me throw mine in as well

Intel Pentium III 550MHz
256MB 100MHz SDRAM (2x64MB, 1x128MB)
HD C = 13.1 GB ATA/66 <-Civ3 on this one
HD D = 15.1 GB ATA/66
DVD E = 8x/48x
CD-RW F = 4x/2x/24x
Zip250 G = External USB Port
16MB AGP Voodoo3 3000D
Turtle Beach Montego II Sound Card

Windows 98SE with IE6

All Hardware are 100% Dx8a compatible.

Programs that run well on my computer, and their screen res that I play on (if required). All color depth are 16-bit

AL|ENS v. Predator: 640x480 (I play AL|EN at 800x600 with no problems)
Jedi Knight: 1280x1024 (Max Monitor Res)
Quake3: 640x480
Force Commander: 640x480
MechWarrior4: 1024x768
Metal Gear Solid: 1024x768
Unreal: 1024x768
Civ3: 1024x768

Programs that I have tried to use but don't run well.

AvP2
Q3: Team Arena
Half-Life


As I posted before I this thread, I don't have a problem between turns.

[simwiz2]

i have a:

366 mHz Celeron
64 MB RAM
4 GB HD
4X CD Drive

and normal maps 8 civs work perfectly, which is what civ3 was designed for. consider anything above 8 civ normal map to be a "freebie" and it wont seem like such a rip-off. after all the only practical alternative was to leave large/huge maps out altogether, which would be even worse IMO.

Edit: AoK TC runs poorly on my computer, SWGB runs very poorly on my computer, and Counterstrike is completely unplayable despite a DSL connection. So its really a nice surprise that civ3 runs at all.

[dubwai]

There are a lot of reasons that Civ II runs slowly on large maps. The foremost being that after the civs have expanded a bit there is a massive amount of information needed to process the game. Some optimization can be always be done, but there is a limit for the minimum amount of memory needed to store that information. No amount of whining is going to change that. The main consideration when trying to solve this is your RAM. When the system runs out of memory it will start pagin out a lot of memory to the hd. This means that it will have to read and write to the hd constantly while processing. Using a NT or even worse DOS based OS you are talking about extremely stupid paging algorithms, so the game may have to page memory in and out several times in what would normally be a very quick process. So if you have any more room for RAM expansion do it, otherwise it might be a good time to get a new machine. They've never been cheaper.

[dubwai]

I meant Civ III not Civ II of course.