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animation times
The animation lag in civ3 is apalling.
With all animations off, moving units do not animate, they just slide like in civ2. Fine by me...except that it still tries to animate the rest of the screen (all 8 million of your automated workers). The bottom line: even with all animations "off", the automated movement phase takes far too long.
Example: in my current game, I have an expansive empire covering a continent almost as large as, say, north and south america in the huge world map. I have many, many workers, and I need every one to keep down pollution. The enemy movement phase takes anywhere from 2 to 15 seconds per enemy. Fine by me. The feedback phase for production and manual moves takes a few minutes. Well, sure, that's fine, and there are ways to speed that up.
Every single turn, the automatic movement phase takes 1-3 minutes. Combine that with a reasonable amount of time for manual movement, feedback, and opponent moves, and each turn can take some 10 minutes. Unless I'm actively at war, I do not do enough to make that time count.
In civ2, you had to spend that long per turn micro-managing your cities and workers. Civ3 makes all that so much easier...but then proceeds to ruin the whole point by animating automated workers. If I cared about animating automated workers, I wouldn't have turned off animation. The other civs can make all their moves in a few seconds, so I should be able to as well. The eye candy of civ3 really means nothing to me. The units in civ2 moved much, much faster.
I'm running a 1333 mhz athlon with 512 mb of ddr ram, a geforce 3, and windows xp. I'm also running civ3 on a laptop with a similar setup but far better 2d animation speed. That's the one I'm quoting.
Has anyone else noticed this problem? I mean, every 5-10 minutes, I get to spend a whole 10 seconds actually doing something, and the rest I stare blankly at workers piling onto each other to build mines. That bothers me.
Anyhow, that's my non-rule-based complaint. And it's my first post too. ^_^
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