Problems with Civ

bastain · November 2, 2003, 18:54

Hi,

I hope you can help me with some problems I got with Civ3-PTW:

- there is no popup when a new invention is made

- sometimes i dont see when a unit is attacked by another one on the map

-neither do i see (shown on the map) when an enemy unit is entering my territory. as a consequence, a unit is destroying e.g. my setllers which i could have avoided

- there a no movies when i build a wonder of the world?

- isnt it possible that i connect two units so that that they move together to a specific place...?

Thanx!!!
Bastian

vmxa1 · November 2, 2003, 19:12

Originally posted by bastain

"- there is no popup when a new invention is made"
True

"- sometimes i dont see when a unit is attacked by another one on the map"

Check your preferences to see what animations are enabled.

"-neither do i see (shown on the map) when an enemy unit is entering my territory. as a consequence, a unit is destroying e.g. my setllers which i could have avoided"

Again what are your settings, I use off so I have to scroll around to see if anything took place, any incursions.

"- there a no movies when i build a wonder of the world?"

They dropped it.

"- isnt it possible that i connect two units so that that they move together to a specific place...?"

J is the stack move for units. It is part of the expanded interface, if you have it enabled.

bastain · November 2, 2003, 19:18

i turned ALL animations on. almost every dot is blue in the preferences-screen....

Ljube · November 3, 2003, 09:23

Tell me vmxa1, is the game going to be any faster if I disable all animations? I enabled all of them because I thought I had a good computer (Pentium 4 at 2.4 GHz with 512 MB of DDR SDRAM), but the game is terribly slow between turns (computer is usually thinking 5 minutes and moving units sometimes 15 or even more minutes). This gives me plenty of time to read newspapers in between turns. And it renders civ 3 unusable for MP.

Also, if you are planning to buy civ 3 gold, please tell me if it had improved in terms of speed. I would like to buy it if it is any good in MP. Otherwise, I'll go for conquests.

alva · November 3, 2003, 09:53

Quote:

faster if I disable all animations?

Yes
-
Go for conquests.

Grim Legacy · November 3, 2003, 11:54

The game quickly becomes unplayable when you have all animations on.

The opponents do not hesitate to route their 1 million units along my borders and it's simply too much to watch them all snail by.

I've still got my own unit animations on, but I should probably turn those off too. On the other hand, these animations prompt me to build railroads as quickly as possible so that the animations stop when moving along on them.

BTW What did you mean with " there is no popup when a new invention is made " ? When an opponent gets one or when you do yourself?

Jaybe · November 3, 2003, 12:48

Brother Grim,
The "useless" AI patrolling along your borders (initially to make you anxious, no doubt) was largely removed in the newest PTW update. In many situations it would still be foolish to leave "friendly" animations on, though.

bastain · November 3, 2003, 18:36

There is no message when I invent something new, neither asks the game what to build in a city with an empty list. It chooses a new invention-goal and a new building/unit to build.

I only recognize that I have invented something new when I see new items on the the building-list in my cities....

Jaybe · November 3, 2003, 20:52

bastain,
Again, check (and experiment with) your preferences.

vmxa1 · November 3, 2003, 21:16

Quote:

Originally posted by ljcvetko
Tell me vmxa1, is the game going to be any faster if I disable all animations? I enabled all of them because I thought I had a good computer (Pentium 4 at 2.4 GHz with 512 MB of DDR SDRAM), but the game is terribly slow between turns (computer is usually thinking 5 minutes and moving units sometimes 15 or even more minutes). This gives me plenty of time to read newspapers in between turns. And it renders civ 3 unusable for MP.

Also, if you are planning to buy civ 3 gold, please tell me if it had improved in terms of speed. I would like to buy it if it is any good in MP. Otherwise, I'll go for conquests.

I already paid for C3C, so no Gold for me at this time.

Speed of play and the PC, hum.
Here is what I have experienced for what it is worth.

On my 3.02GH with 1GB and 9800 PRO most games have no real delays. The caveat is when you have lots of island cities and they have harbors. Now in that case on a huge map, you can get very long waits, up to 25 minutes (1 hr on my 1.7GH PC).
Now this was a 250 by 250 map with 24 civs IIRC (AU402). Many civs were very large with hundreds of units and lots of wars going on. Animation is not the issue with the delay, well it did not help, it is the need to recalculate trade routes for all civs, if a cities either fell or was built.

My reason to disable the animation is I do not want to watch them over and over, especially in a game with large numbers of units. I once was over 100 tanks move to one tile and decided that was not fun.

TechWins · November 3, 2003, 22:05

The game was designed for 8 civs and not an exceptionally large map. If you're playing against the design of the game don't expect good results by your computer. Although, it can still be slow even with 8 civs and a standard size map.

MrWhereItsAt · November 3, 2003, 22:18

Huge games with more civs than 16 or so is what leads to the slowdown, and no-one, no matter what their setup, has found turnwaits for games such as this less than 5-10 minutes once you start getting into the late Medieval/early Industrial ages.

Civ is actually fairly setup-blind, so you can play almost as fast on a P4 2.4 as you can on an old P3 800 (my work and home computers respectively

) as long as you don;t have too many civs/too much land.

I can't imagine Civ3 Gold is any better than any other version of the game, just include the latest patch versions of Civ3 and PtW, which you can get by downloading the latest patches for the individual games yourself. If someone knows better and can correct me on this please do.

And to address the question about no tech pop-ups when you discover something - I have not seen it before, but are you playing with a hacked or modded version of the game? They could cause strange effects like this at times. You can always see what advance you are researching by looking at the bottom of the box at the RHS of the screen - this tells you your current tech target and how many turns until completion. Just keep track of it and you needn't have any worries.

Ljube · November 4, 2003, 12:49

Quote:

Originally posted by vmxa1
I already paid for C3C, so no Gold for me at this time.

So what's it like?

Quote:

Originally posted by vmxa1
The caveat is when you have lots of island cities and they have harbors.

........

Animation is not the issue with the delay, well it did not help, it is the need to recalculate trade routes for all civs, if a cities either fell or was built.

Recently, I have been playing archipelago maps mostly. So that might be the case. If I go back to continents (pangea) maybe I could reduce the delay. Thanks for the tip

Ljube · November 4, 2003, 12:53

Quote:

Originally posted by MrWhereItsAt
I can't imagine Civ3 Gold is any better than any other version of the game, just include the latest patch versions of Civ3 and PtW, which you can get by downloading the latest patches for the individual games yourself. If someone knows better and can correct me on this please do.

Alas, I don't have PtW. Only original Civ 3.

alva · November 4, 2003, 13:01

Quote:

So what's it like?

He hasn't got yet, just paid for it.

Grim Legacy · November 5, 2003, 10:02

Quote:

Originally posted by Jaybe
Brother Grim,
The "useless" AI patrolling along your borders (initially to make you anxious, no doubt) was largely removed in the newest PTW update. In many situations it would still be foolish to leave "friendly" animations on, though.

It's also a side effect of being sneak-attacked; the once quickly zipping units suddenly become hostile (whose animation I left on) and come animating one by one towards my cities... leaving me with minutes to ponder how the opponent managed to produce such an excessive army.

Shogun Gunner · November 5, 2003, 12:51

Yes, the island maps - which I like to play - do take longer. Have you ever noticed the delay when a surface ship bombs an enemy city and destroys the harbor?

That's about the time, I reach for the National Geographic or The Economist

MrWhereItsAt · November 6, 2003, 08:07

Quote:

Originally posted by ljcvetko

Alas, I don't have PtW. Only original Civ 3.

Hmm... although I haven't played the vanilla game since I got PtW, I imagine the latest patch for Civ3 likely had the same speed-improving update(s) that the lates version of PtW had.

In the restarted Civ3 Democracy Game we noticed quite a decrease in between turn waits once we upgraded to PtW v1.27. Still hideously long for a 24-civ huge world of course, just less than before.