Help - 20 min per turn

[HBergeron]

Playing Marla's World Map, Huge, All Civs - The game's been designed to allow this, I can't believe that 20 minutes (I've timed them) was considered playable. I have a P3 1ghz with 425megs of ram and the computer benchmarks fine.

I am up to 1625AD and spent a LOT of time on this game, I don't want to abandon it, but it is becoming impossible to play. Is there anything I can do to speed up the game at this point? Years of my life playing Civ1-2-3, you think I'd be over it, but no.

[notyoueither]

I've heard of similar problems, however I am baffled.

I have a Duron 900 (effectively), 256M RAM and do not ever have AI turns longer than 2 or 3 minutes. I have played huge random maps all the way through.

Have you tried emailing support at Infogrammes?

There has to be a reason for the slow downs that some people are seeing, but that others are not.

If you wish to email Infogrames go here:
http://www.ina-support.com/faq/civ3_pc.asp
scroll to the bottom and hit the *email support* button.

I would hope that they are collecting and comparing configuration information from people experiencing performance issues. Hopefully they and Firaxis can find a solution.

[Darkknight]

The main cause of long turn times in Civ3 is the trade routes and the cultural borders. In that order.
For example: If a harbor is destroyed in a city then the game needs to figure out can you still build that unit and if not what to change it to etc...
That's just the tip of it. The trade routes is a very complicated piece of programming and it takes time to go through.

To reduce turn times try turning off Seti@Home or anything else like antivirus programs running in the backround.
The best way to reduce turn times is of course to use smaller maps and less civs. Again in that order.
If you have a 2:1 map and you increase height and width 1 1/2 times then that is doubling the area of the map.
I play on standard size with 4-5 players and have never experienced a turn more then 30 seconds right up until 2000ad

[Todd Hawks]

Civ3 was never designed to be played with more than 8 civs or on that huge maps. Firaxis put the option in after a lot of people complained about it.

So it is not surprising that turns take that long with Marla's map.

Although 20 min seems a little bit extreme.

The only thing you could do (apart from turning of other programs running in the background) is to turn off all unit animations. This won't help with the calculated part but at least you don't have to watch dozens of units walking around.