What's taking so long when founding a city?

[Cagliostro]

I play huge worldmaps with as many civs as possible (256², 31 civs with PTW right now) - The moves are taking about 20 mins now (athon xp 1800+, 512mb cl2 timed ddr ram, winxp pro), but I understad why (hundreds of cities to be managed, thousands of units to be moved etc...), but when I found or conquer a city now, it's taking about 1-2 minutes from pressing "b" (or conquering ist) to get to the city screen - CPU load is on max when I do it and I don't understand what's so much to compute about it. Anyone with a clue?

Another thing I observed - when I trade certain technologies, it's the same as mentioned above - it just computes 1-2 minutes - funny thing is: It occurs with some advantages and with some it does not. One example: If I give magnetism or navigation, it takes long - if I give military tradition, it doesn't.
I could imagine the AI changing production in lots of cities and this causing the delay, but only if I trade it when it's their turn, which I never do (because they could trade it to some other civ before I could).

Similar things occur with some bombardments - most of the time, I bombard and it goes on normally, but sometimes it just takes quite some time...

So what's this all about

[Asterothe]

That's crazy

[Cartouche Bee]

Well, you don't have to have that many cities to figure this out.

The real big delays you see are when changes to trade occur. For instance, when you bombard a city, I'll bet the big delays you see are when you do something like destroy a harbor. The program then has to go and check to see if that changes the trade situation for every other city on the map. Same when you build a new city, planting that city may make some sort of trade change and every city is reprocessed.

I don't know if you use city governors but if you do try this. Go to the governor and apply a change like maximize production to this city. It will take the governor just as long to process that request as it does to process a request to apply changes to all cities.

I've had games where to speed it up I had to shut the governors off. (and I personally like them, not for production but for happiness and food)

Bet if you build a harbor in one of those cities it takes quite a while also.

I know it does not help but you asked.

[vmxa1]

sounds like a good reason to not play those types of games to me, especialy since I have basically the same rig.

[Cagliostro]

Thanks Cartouche Bee - that explains it - I didn't expect a solution anyway - I was just wondering why...

[Tattila the Hun]

No wonder why turns took aeons on marla's map on my amd 500...

[miccofl]

Only 20 min? You can support a larger military, build more tanks! Welcome to the wonderful world of huge maps. Start bombarding or pillaging resource tiles and cutting road/rail links between cities. This will slow things down even more. Bombarding a city and destroying a harbor or airport will usually give you enough time for a quick trip to the bathroom or a raid on the refrigerator.

Cartouche Bee has hit the city nail squarely on the head, it's like those old chess programs that had to compute every possible move before actually making one, only with Civ3 the number of possibilities have increased exponentially.

Are your workers automated? If they are, and they are sitting in cities because they have nothing to do, they are real time wasters. The AI will cycle through every one of them searching for a task before it re-fortifies and moves on. If this is the case you should go through all your workers and manually fortify them, give them something to do, join city, etc. - a real timesaver.

[Harovan]

There are several points in the game, where it seems to "freeze" for a while. Most of them are trade and resource related. First, the one Cartouche Bee pointed out. Then, when you or an AI civ discover or trade for Astronomy, Navigation or Magnetism for instance. All trade routes have to be recalculated. Or when a war breaks out. Same thing, because trade routes to another civ could now go through enemy territory or waters and thus be interrupted.

[Cartouche Bee]

Originally posted by miccofl
Are your workers automated? If they are, and they are sitting in cities because they have nothing to do, they are real time wasters. The AI will cycle through every one of them searching for a task before it re-fortifies and moves on. If this is the case you should go through all your workers and manually fortify them, give them something to do, join city, etc. - a real timesaver.

I didn't want to mention that one! If you are on a huge land mass and all the land improvement are done, every automated worker has to scan every tile every turn to see if it has a job that it can be assigned to. Whew, it can be real bad if you used hundreds of workers to get to that point. Once the workers start to gather in the cities then I reactivate them (take them off auto [extra boring chore] and add them to cities), you need to be sure to do it early in the turn otherwise, if you get to the automated unit movement cycle of the turn, go for coffee, coke, pizza or whatever your partial to.

[miccofl]

if you get to the automated unit movement cycle of the turn, go for coffee, coke, pizza or whatever your partial to.

You should have time to make the pizza from scratch, set the dough bowl on top of the monitor vents, it should rise in about an hour.

[Mad Bomber]

I play on huge maps and I have gotten to know the delay times almost by heart, lets see, I destroyed Richmond's harbor, time for a restroom break


but I have had an additional problem, every so often I move a naval unit and the game crashes, not freezes for a few minutes, CRASHES. It can get very annoying when the ship is the last move of the turn.

[Cagliostro]

thanks for the hints - I'll check some of it (especially the worker part)

[Jeannette]

Waaiiiiiiiitttiiinnnnnnnnggggggg

The tip re "workers on automatic sitting idle in cities" is good! Do you know any others, either within the game or tweaks to my system? Do other programs running affect Civ III processing time? Is there any adjustment one can make to the processor itself?
And is Firaxis working on a smarter, time-saving formula? Playing 15 civs is a strategic pleasure, challenge, etc., but a time-consuming pain in the (*&^%$#@!!!!

[ducki]

On workers: I don't play huge, but this might help.
In my empire, I usually have a hill designated "Elite Hill".
This is where I store my Elite forces between wars, so I know where they are, so they don't accidentally get lost in a culture-flip, and so they don't get surprise attacked by an AI.

Anyway, once I don't have anything but Pollution Control for my workers to do for a while, I manually Fortify them on Elite Hill, along with all my Fortified Elites - except for one, who is my "placeholder". I always have one Elite on that hill that is not Fortified, so that I don't inadvertently a)forget they are there, b)miss a turn for pollution clean-up, or c)skip an upgrade when needed.

I keep enough workers to clean up 3 or 4 Polluted Squares on the same turn, so it's handy to not have to deal with them all the time.


HTH

[Tattila the Hun]

Reminder unit is a great thing to have, when one has a hole for a head, like I do.