AI seems very slow

[Mad-Kat]

Oh come on! Who the hell still uses a 233 mhz PC for games? If you do and still have less than 128 meg of ram, save your poor, little valued pennies since you are obviously a complete tightwad. Stick to playing windows solitaire!

[Jen Dragon]

like someone above said dont waste your money on memory up grade of pii get a piii or anthalon 700 to 800 range for a couple of hundred thats only 4 or 5 computer games. pii 233, your not a gamer, you cant be.

[zaz]

quote: Originally posted by Mad-Kat on 11-18-2000 12:35 AM Oh come on! Who the hell still uses a 233 mhz PC for games? If you do and still have less than 128 meg of ram, save your poor, little valued pennies since you are obviously a complete tightwad. Stick to playing windows solitaire!

Those of us who don't have $1,000, for a new P3-4 system.

By the way, I currently play SimCity 3000 Unlimited, which is a resource hog RTS, on my P1 166MHz and it works fine. Can't wait to see how this compares since it is only a TBS game.

[Depp]

Got a Athlon T-Bird 800 Mhz and 256 mb PC133 SDRAM. I hav no problems
And that the AI takes time is a GOOD thing... Maybe it´s smarter eh ?

[MidKnight Lament]

quote: Originally posted by Mad-Kat on 11-18-2000 12:35 AM Oh come on! Who the hell still uses a 233 mhz PC for games? If you do and still have less than 128 meg of ram, save your poor, little valued pennies since you are obviously a complete tightwad. Stick to playing windows solitaire!

Thanks. That's very helpful, Mad-Kat.

Obviously if I had the money to buy a complete upgrade I would. It may surprise you to know that some people don't have money to be throwing around on computers. If being a gamer means that my computer sits higher on my priority list than rent or food, then I'm glad I'm not a gamer.

In six months time I'll have more than enough to spend on a big-arse PC, but until then a little sympathy wouldn't go astray.



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- MKL
"And a sun that doesn't set but settles" - Augie March
Shameless Plug: http://www.poetic-license.org ............. All welcome.

[violent]

build a computer...it's a lot cheaper than buying a complete system. A 1 gig amd processor costs around $280.

[Sky Dog]

Bringing this topic back, I think there may be a memory leak. The AI slows down after I've been playing a long time, but after I reboot, the AI turns get quite a bit faster and are not a problem. I'm using an AMD K6-2, 475mhZ, 128MB system.

[Savant]

Yes, you're right. I forgot that memturbo does have a TSR and will run on it's own. I disabled the TSR on my game drive though bc I found that it would crash some games. I forget if CTP was one of them.


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'Blood will run'

[Savant]

OK, a memory leak. I think you may be right. That also makes the game a real memory hog but with 128 mb dimms at $42 (see Pricewatch.com) that is less than the cost of the game.

The other thing, which is not as good a solution is to spend like $10 for memturbo which is a memory defraging program designed to recover RAM from those memory leaks. Of course, you would have to alt-tab to run memturbo, interrupting your game. But that is a low-cost option.



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'Blood will run'

[Aristos]

quote: Originally posted by Savant on 11-19-2000 12:00 PM OK, a memory leak. I think you may be right. That also makes the game a real memory hog but with 128 mb dimms at $42 (see Pricewatch.com) that is less than the cost of the game. The other thing, which is not as good a solution is to spend like $10 for memturbo which is a memory defraging program designed to recover RAM from those memory leaks. Of course, you would have to alt-tab to run memturbo, interrupting your game. But that is a low-cost option.

Nope you don't have to. Memturbo has a TSR which runs every x minutes (customizable) to recover y megas (customizable also), or when it reaches bottom level of z megas.

It works fine, cause it puts all the windows stuff (if not accesed, which is the case when you play a game) into the swap area, so physical memory is free for the game.

You should test it. Evaluation version works for 30 days.

Give it a try

Rebel Rick

[Cyrius]

Um, I have a Celeron 300 running at 450 and 128 mb or RAM, game runs perfectly well for me with 8 civs. My computer is 2 years old, too. Guys, if your running a pentium 233, it might be time to consider an upgrade.

I haven't seen any animated goods yet. I liked that in CTP1, even though it slowed the game down. Am I missing something?

[Solver]

64 MB is enough, 32 is not. CTP doens't need that much memory, as I will not degrade to Windows 2000, I think this is enough, though I yet consider going to 128...

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Solver - http://www.aok.20m.com

[Locutus]

Well, I've been playing pre-release versions of the game (with all kind of debug-code in it that slows things down) on my P200 (64 MB) for quite a while now and I'm very satisfied with the speed. Okay, the Alexander scenario is a wee bit slow, but for the rest it's very acceptable and the final game should be even faster.

The thing is, it's not just processor speed and amount of memory that counts, it's also how you use it. I've been optimizing the speed of my computer for several years now and I'm convinced that my P200 is faster in running apps and games (not in pure processing power of course) than some of those PII400's out there (in fact, I know for a fact that my system is faster than the PII 300 of my neighbours). Not loading components of Windows you don't or hardly use, not having any TSR's running, optimizing the BIOS settings, using the right amount of cache and virtual memory, etc., etc. It all helps improving the performance of your computer. People who've never done any of this can probably boost performance of their system with more than 50%. It's just that it takes a lot of time and patience to squeeze everything out of your system that's in it. But the fact that it doesn't cost a penny makes it, at least for a poor student like me, well worth the effort. (In fact, at one point I spent 40 bucks or so on 32MB extra memory and I was quite dissappointed with how little improvement that gave me, whereas reconfiguring my BIOS was free but much more effective).

[Savant]

Locutus you are so right!! It's not just the resources you possess, but those available to your machine in time of need.

I agree that you should keep TSRs to a minimum. For my gaming machine, I have two swappable master harddrives for this reason.

On drive 1 (AbitaPro), a 14.4 GB IBM @ 7200RPM, I have all my work and internet applications and it's loaded with TSRs, reducing my available RAM from 256mb to 140mb after bootup. It also has several device drivers to load not present on my gaming hard drive like a swappable slave and a parallel port drive. The registry is also large at 7.5 mbs in size.

On drive 2 (AbitaPlay), a 20.5 GB WD @ 7200 RPM, I have a "trimmed" set of work and internet applications.. just the basics (IE 5.0 not 5.5 for example). On this I also have my games, prominently featuring CTP1 with Wes' Mod on a separate partition. When I boot up on this drive, I have 180mb of free RAM. The registry is about 4.5 mb in size.

It is faster, leaner, and boots up in about 1/2 the time all bc of TSR, registry, and device loading differences despite being the same machine.

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'Blood will run'