Huge Map too slow?

[Elrad]

I recently tried playing on the huge map provided with civ 3 and all 16 nations. I must say, it was a blast! The amount of realism of having my 10 city empire be but a small spec of a large multi political world was amazing (I think games where you are humbled are alot more fun than where you easily dominate, I was playing on emperor btw)

I started in the north america region, and after some short conquests to solidify my borders (the comps expand 3 times my speed but they cant compare when it comes to battle field tactics) I largely played the head empire of the America Continents. Before I knew it however, as early as 100ad, the game started to drag between turns. While before to cycle through 15 computers it only took say 10 seconds, it slowly rose to what I clocked at an average of 1 min between turns (waiting period). Given that some of my turns took less than that to make...this was a real bummer.

(If civ had 1000 turns, assuming the waiting period does not get even worse towards the late game, that would be over 15 hours of just "waiting" between turns)

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas about how to avoid this problem? I suppose just Ram or a better Processor would help, but couldn't alot also be done to simply speed up the computers executions? (I heard it does alot of random unit patroling which sucks up the majority of the time, if this could be remedied somehow)

Anyway I personaly think that the huge 16 player expirience isnt something one cast just forget about and move on, its too much fun to abandon hope for! Has anyone else tried huge with more success? how about those of you with kickass computers?

-Elrad

P.S. Normal games run fine, an 8 player normal size game takes under 10 seconds to execute as late as the modern age...ignoring the moves that you get to see

[GodSpawn]

I heard that holding down during the computer's move will turn off some animations and speed things up.

I also hear that the speed issue is being looked at for the patch.

(Roll on Friday!)

[Reibisch]

Well, you can get more ram and such, but in my experience that will likely help very little.

I've got an Athlon 1.2ghz with 768mb ram and on a huge map (16 civs, all at war), turns can take as much as 90-120 seconds. Sometimes my "action" in a turn consists entirely of press space, and might only take 2 or 3 seconds, so I can certainly understand your frustration. However, I also have a p2 450 laptop with only 96mb ram. When using the same savegame, the turns take the same amount of time (give or take 2 or 3 seconds). This means based on my own experience that either Civ3 is using some sort of math function that AMD's don't steamline, or that there is some sort of speed limiter in the game itself.

[Faboba]

Originally posted by GodSpawn
I heard that holding down during the computer's move will turn off some animations and speed things up.

And according to my granny ( IT specialist for 63 years now ) if you sprinkle salt in a circle round your computer three times you're processor speed will double. Something about banishing the demon WHIN-dowes.

[IronSpam]

Hey Elrad -

Yeah I noticed the slowness too; about a minute between turns is right. There's so much time spent waiting they should connect the game to the web and display banner ads! For the most part, they've got my attention!

I tried to do little things while waiting like making dinner and cleaning my apartment. (But my apartment can only get so clean!). However, leaving my machine doesn't work, since there are frequent announcements that require player acknowledgement in order for the program to continue. For instance, a message like "Germany has declared war on France" needs you to click the window shut before the system finishes processing the AI moves.

Maybe these announcements should be presented in digest form listing out all the current events so that you don't have to click through all of them unless necessary. Or should I read the (expletive deleted) manual and follow the instructions on how to shut off these announcement panels?

I'm moving over to a faster laptop (800 mhz) to see whether there are any improvements. I'll write back and give you the news.

Oh yeah, when you played your huge game with sixteen civilizations, how did you contact all of the AI countries on the Foreign Advisor screen? I played a huge game, and only the first eight nations I contacted appeared there, even after establishing embassies with everyone. Also, seeing the treaties and trade agreements between all sixteen of us would be nice.

The other seven were nowhere to be found. I ended up having to contact the latter powers by stationing a unit near their borders and clicking on a passing foreign unit. That was somewhat inconvenient, and I'm probably missing something there. (I know this question may have been answered somewhere else on this bulletin board, so please excuse my ignorance.)

[Aendolin]

Hold down "shift" and right click on any leader head in the foreign advisor screen. You can replace that leader with any of the leaders not currently shown. Hope this helps!

[IronSpam]

Aendolin -

Thanks a lot.

[Elrad]

Originally posted by Aendolin
Hold down "shift" and right click on any leader head in the foreign advisor screen. You can replace that leader with any of the leaders not currently shown. Hope this helps!

Thats pretty neat, another way I've been using is holding Cntr D as a shortcut to pop up all the possible leaders to contact (not the advisor screen but a mini window that shows all 15)

I also found out there are lots of these hold Shft or Cntr shortcuts, the neatest one is when you hold Shift (or control, I froget) and click on a city, without going into it you can re-assign what its building.

Otherwise its good to hear that the patch may easen this problem, and that I don't have to go buy a new comp just for civ 3 (I've got a 400mhz, 312 ram celeron and its still kicking after over 3 years!)

-Elrad