Laptop friendly?

[ajbera]

It works on mine ( I took a chance). However, explosions cause the game to crawl, so I had to turn them off. This is a shame. Any chance they can implement simple explosions, a quick flash of light or something instead of the multi-color, multi-frame booms?

[AoA]

I have a three year old Toshiba with a Geforce4 460 Go 32 MB card and was told by the Powers that Be that it would be impossible to run it. Well, I turned off anti-aliasing and kept the rez at the lowest setting and boom, all is good. Sometimes a pop-up screen telling me that there is an economy boost will be blank except for the text (I don't even know if there should be a picture or movie or whatever) but otherwise, the game plays and looks fine.


Rustwork, what problems did you have with Civ4? Since I have a smiliar set up and I can run Civ4 easily, maybe I could help you figure out what went wrong.

[Rustwork]

AoA: i was having the black terrain. and my cursor moved so slow that at times i thought the game had froze, then the cursor would start moving again. i probably should have updated my drivers at the time, and waited for a patch.

i immediately went on the forums and was reading much about the game needing more video power which i didn't think i would ever have, so i quickly went back to get a refund instead of being stuck with something i couldn't use. i was able to play on a different computer for about an hour, and i wasn't as drawn to it as i was with civ3. after that i didn't have the interest to look for a solution. i thought a relative would use the best buy card and give me the cash, which i actually needed at the time. this never happened. along comes galciv2 . . . . .

i am curious whether i could have gotten civ4 to run. i am sure i will need to increase my computing capabilities in a year or so. i will probably wait to purchase civ4 until then. i didn't even buy civ3 until play the world had just been released. like i said i am curious though. if i knew definately it would run at an acceptable level i'd more than likely buy it sooner. maybe a few full days with the game, and i'd again know what it's like to go to work on only 2hrs of sleep.

[Shadowlord]

I was a little surprised you could run Civ IV easily on that, AoA, when in the late game I'm getting 11 FPS on my GeForce FX 5600 - until I realized that the reason is probably that the GeForce 4 460 apparently lacks pixel and vertex shaders entirely. Civ IV apparently uses a ton of those normally (and if I let it use PS/VS 2.0 on my card, it runs at 9 FPS for the entire game - I had to lock them to 1.1/1.4 to get a decent framerate), so it makes sense, if Civ IV's low framerate here is mostly due to shaders.

Rustwork, there is a Civ IV demo out, so you can try that to see if it runs any better now (But I'm not sure if it incorporates all the patches). However, a lot may depend on how much RAM you have. It uses most of my available RAM near the end of a standard size map, and I've got 512 MB. I can't play Large maps since they crash in the late game, and Huge maps crash within a minute or two after starting the game. If you've got less RAM, you might find that you can only play small or tiny maps.

GalCiv II sounds like it works a hell of a lot better on older machines than Civ IV.

There was a GalCiv II dev journal post back in february (about 8 days after than this thread was started) about why they put effort into making it work on low end systems - Draginol basically said that was done for the laptop users. That post is here: http://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=164&AID=101421

I for one think it's a great idea to make the game work well even on low-end machines. There are a heck of a lot of people who might like to play TBSes on their laptop, and there are a good many people with aging computers, too. It's even better than it worked on older computers out of the box (assuming the video drivers are up to date?), whereas when Civ IV came out, its low-end support code was basically FUBAR and had to be fixed in patches. (I was a little surprised Firaxis hadn't caught that before release, actually. I guess they didn't have enough time to test the fallback code that runs when shader support isn't available?)

[Mart]

No problem here on ATI Mobility Radeon 9000
Fujitsu Lifebook N3010

[AoA]

Both my Civ4 and GalCiv2 run smooth even in late game. Now part of the mix could be that I rarely run greater than small size as I don't feel like keeping track of too many bases or two many units. I had the black terrain in Civ4 which was resolved with 1.52 and my GalCiv2 worked fine with shutting off the anti-aliasing.

I never was able to upgrade drivers without messing up my system, so I guess I was just lucky.

Since the demo is coming out soon, maybe it'd be best to wait. Unless you like living dangerously like me, you could always but it and try it. Worked swell for me twice.

[g_storrow]

On my laptop it cant use galciv2.launch and crashes! But works fine on my other one.