Slowdown on 966Mhz PIII on Huge Maps

Akaoz · November 18, 2001, 10:46

Slowdown on 966Mhz PIII on Huge Maps

I run a 966Mhz PIII, GeForce2 (64Mb), 256Mb RAM, WinMX machine. When I play the game on huge maps (255x255) w/ 16 civs, it slows down to a crawl between turns.

It goes from no delay to a 1-minute delay in the middle ages. Then it gets worse. I'm currently in 1920 and I have to wait 15-16 minutes for the game to complete the AI moves.

The game is not slow at all on my moves, except when I raze or conquer a city. Then I get a 2-minute delay while the map updates. I have no problems with scrolling or anything like that though.

BTW the save file is up to about 9Mb!

Does anyone know if this is a bug or a feature? And if it's a bug will it be fixed?

-Alech

Rosacrux · November 18, 2001, 10:54

I am afraid this is not a bug. It just takes ages to calculate the AI turns (moving all those houndreds of units... takes too much time).

I am only so far as 15th century and I barely can stand the 3+ minutes delay in every turn (on a huge map - 16 civs).

I surely do hope they are going to adress this one way or another, or "huge" will be pretty much unplayable - right now I am doing things at home (even cooking - my wive likes this game

) between turns. If - as you say - it goes up to 15-20 minutes turns... well, I guess I'll have the time to take a nap

Firaxians, please find a way to reduce the waiting time, it's a killer! It doesn't allow huge maps!

John-SJ · November 18, 2001, 11:07

I have read on this site (and tried it myself) that if you hold down the Shift key the AI turn goes faster. I was hoping it would be a lot faster, but it's not. If you're lucky it may cut the wait time in half, so instead of a 15 minute AI turn where you can get up and do something you'll be stuck with an 8 minute AI turn where you have to remain glued to your computer. Some solution, huh?

To me, this is no solution at all. Neither is buying a faster computer, which was also suggested here. Even if I wanted to spend $2000 for a top of the line rig and even if it reduced wait times by 75% IMO a 5 minute wait time near the end of the game is totally UNACCEPTABLE!

This is one thing that Firaxis has got to fix, or they should just withdraw the game from the market now and reintroduce it when the first 20Ghz P8 is is on the market.

John-SJ

Johnny_Was · November 18, 2001, 11:51

The game is pretty much unplayable for me on anything larger than Standard. So I don't play it.

I'm running a P4 1.8ghz, 512 MB RDRAM, GeForce 3 and once the game hits the 14th century it slows to a crawl - not just that AI turns but everything - opening menus, my units moving across the map - it's interminable.

Forget scrolling, I can't scroll properly from the first turn - scrolling does not exist for me.

This is unacceptable and there is no excuse for it - this is not a graphically intensive game; it's just an un-optimised one.

And it's going back on the shelf until Firaxis puts out a patch that addresses these issue. If they ever care to...

'Sid Meier's What-Can-I-Do-They-Drove-A-Dump-Truck-Full-Of-Money-Up-To-My-House III'

solo · November 18, 2001, 12:17

Turning off all the animation options helps a bit, but no one wants to spend minutes watching AI naval units execute their senseless patrols. In the chat with Soren Johnson, he said that this issue will be addressed in the first patch, so we can wait and hope the situation improves. In the meantime, tiny map games are the way to go.

Venger · November 18, 2001, 12:31

Completely unacceptable. You don't think they actually gameplay tested this thing do you?

Venger

Eli · November 18, 2001, 13:37

When people asked more than 8 civs they knew what they need to expect to.

Simply play with less Civs, imagine that only 8 are available in the game.

John-SJ · November 18, 2001, 14:18

Eli,

That doesn't work. On a huge map I played a game with only 8 civs total and by the late middle ages the entire map was filled with cities. I think the # of cities is more important than the # of civs, at least I can tell you, the slowdown with 8 civs on a huge map is severe! I can't prove that it's as bad as 16 because I refuse to deal with the slowdown again, but at least I know that it's bad enough to be unplayable.

John-SJ

John-SJ · November 18, 2001, 15:18

Quote:

Originally posted by Eli
When people asked more than 8 civs they knew what they need to expect to.

This game (according to Firaxis) only requires a P2 300Mhz with 32 Mb ram. Using this as a guide one might reasonably expect that a P3 running at ANY speed should be able to handle the most demanding game configurations (say, huge map, 16 civs, full audio, full animations, etc.) with ease.

The only problem with that expectation is that Firaxis seems to have neglected to inform its customers that with a P2 300Mhz you can only reasonably play the game with 4 civs on a tiny map.

Nothing like truth in advertising, eh?

John-SJ

RedWhiteArcher · November 18, 2001, 15:26

I play 16 civs on standart only. Its quite fast that way. In advanced stages I get 10-15 secs between turns. Much like in Civ II I think.
The problem is moving all the AI units. Did you see that he moves them all the time, all the time ALL THE TIME just for patrooling the are with one def and one attacking unit, and ofcourse all these workers.

Akaoz · November 18, 2001, 15:34

I think the problem is either cities or map size, not the number of civs...

-Alech

John-SJ · November 18, 2001, 16:20

I just did an experiment. In the game I am playing now with all animations enabled it is taking 92 seconds for the AI turn to complete. I then timed the AI turn while holding the Shift key - 71 seconds, and when I turned off ALL animations and held the Shift key it took 72 seconds.

In other words, holding the shift key gave less than a 25% improvement in AI turn time, and turning off animations made no difference whatsoever.

John-SJ

star mouse · November 18, 2001, 19:27

I have played 1 game so far, 10 civs, large map, and I found few speed issues with 10-15 secs between AI turns. (I finished the game in about 1880 with a diplomatic victory on chieftain level.) I have a mid-range AMD K6 with 256 Mb of memory, running Windoze 98.

What I have noticed is some problems with CIV3 taking a large amount of virtual memory, and this could be related to the slow AI turns. I have a dedicated virtual-memory partition with nothing but the swap file on a 520-Mb partition. On a few occasions, such as when I load CIV3 or quit, Windoze reports that there's no more space on the swap partition. I usualy quit CIV3 at this point and reboot, and it's fine after that. It only happens when I've reloaded CIV3 after playing it before.

I think the game would probably speed up if CIV3 and/or Windows managed its memory usage better. People with slow CIV3 and small amounts of memory should also consider taking advantage of the current cheap memory prices to add another 128 Mb or 256 Mb of memory to their PCs. This might improve things.

star mouse · November 18, 2001, 19:36

One thing I have noticed is quite slow is the "Go-to tile" command. When you have a unit selected, press G and move the cursor to another location, perhaps 10 tiles away across terrain that varies and has a partial road network. It can take the computer 2 or 3 seconds to come up with a path.

Now imagine the AI doing this 100 or 200 times. I expect the same "go to" algorithm being used extensively by the AI for its unit orders. If this is the case, it comes as no surprise that the AI turns are so slow.

Simpleton · November 18, 2001, 20:32

Quote:

Originally posted by Rosacrux

I surely do hope they are going to adress this one way or another, or "huge" will be pretty much unplayable -

I doubt they will address it because Firaxis is only supporting the game to be played for upto 8 civs. If your playing with 16 civs and having trouble you might be on your own.
I can't blame them because pretty much all gaming companies don't offer their help if you've hacked the program code or changed the game rules.

[ID]KuZGuN · November 18, 2001, 21:44

I have a 1.2 GhZ AMD Thunderbird, 128 MB DDR RAM, GeForce2 GTS 32 MB... I tried playing on a huge map, with 10 civs, and in the 1800s the game got unplayable. I thought maybe it was because of my CPU... maybe the game wasn't optimized for AMDs... I tried a Pentium III 700, 128 MB machine, and to no avail the results were much worse.

With 1.2 GhZ AMD I started getting 1-3 minutes of wait time which made the game unplayable for me, but as I look here in the forums, AMD performs much better than Intel because of it's strong math processing and level1 and L2 caches start giving hits after a few minutes of playing.

The best thing would be a patch or at least a SUGGESTION from Firaxis. The next best thing, if you can buy a DDR AMD 1500+ and 256+ system. I beleive it would make the game a bit more playable, at least not 15 minutes. The last best thing is DON'T play on huge maps. You can still play on large maps with 16 civs w/o much problems.

John-SJ · November 18, 2001, 22:26

Quote:

Originally posted by Simpleton
I doubt they will address it because Firaxis is only supporting the game to be played for upto 8 civs. If your playing with 16 civs and having trouble you might be on your own.
I can't blame them because pretty much all gaming companies don't offer their help if you've hacked the program code or changed the game rules.

Only problem is, both huge maps and 16 civs are supported right out of the box, no hacking on players part. If Firaxis doesn't adequately fix this problem for ALL P3 (and equiv. speed Athlon) users I would seriously question their commitment to the player community.

John-SJ

ElitePersian · November 19, 2001, 00:29

Well, i bet Firaxis is already paying the price for this, i'll bet a lotta ppl arent playing the game anymore cause of the slow turns - that shows really how long some ppl have to wait in between turns.

Cavalier_13 · November 19, 2001, 02:51

Well, my time delays in this game in the latter parts are only occuring in 2 occasions.........

1> When I get cultural expansion, the game takes 1 to 3 minutes to determine how much of my rival's areas I am eating into.

2> This is the killer, but ANYTIME ANYTHING that has to do with the trade network is affected, it is plain old CRAWL! I am now in 1920's and when I create an airport OR a harbour, that city takes upwards to 5 minutes to update. This also affects my rival civs since when at war, I like to destroy civs by cutting their infrastructures to the ground, effectively depriving them of special resources and luxeries. Make their cites go into unrest....but I digress.

Whenever I hit a road with artillery or destroy an enemy harbour / airport, I again get a 5 minute wait.

In my experience, it has not been the moving of units. I disabled the enemy animations and their unit moves go quite quick. To test this, I stole the plans of all the civs so I knew ALL their locations (16 civs, 1921, HUGE map) and so the computer showed me every move they made.....and the actual move portion took 2 to 3 minutes total. All of this on a P2 450MHz with 512MB of RAM.

So, Firaxis, can you all look into this?

Cavalier

The Viceroy · November 19, 2001, 04:48

Ive been reading this with some interest.. It took me back to similar problems I had with CTP2 ... If it is Virtual memory (as it was with CTP2) its a windows thing .. I found the following a great help ...

1) Remove any pictures you have on your desktop .. as it takes a load of memory/v-memory up, and only increases the problem of paging if you have to use v-memory.

2) Remove as many processes as possible. The real killer on my set with CTP was the SETI Client ... not only did it take 32Mb of my 64Mb of ram, it also seems to interfere with idle priority threads .. So remove everything but the bare explorer if you can.

3) Obvious this one, but defrag your HD !!

Even though you have 256Mb of Ram or more, Windows will page memory onto V-Mem if its not been accessed for a while (like the desktop image) .. so you can still end up using V-Mem if you have a lot of other processes handing about.

It would be interesting if somebody (as im at work) could run a monitor in the background (or use CTRL-SHFT-ESC on XP/NT/2000) and watch memory usage ... see if its leaking at all ????

Hope some of that helps.

ps.. It runs like a dream on my P4 2Ghz 256Mb .. but then, I just bought it the other day .. so haven't hammered it yet

Blisterz · November 19, 2001, 05:16

Quote:

Originally posted by RedWhiteArcher
I play 16 civs on standart only. Its quite fast that way.

How do you manage that? when i pic standard map I only get 8 civs to choose from not 16. Am i missing somthing?

Shiva · November 19, 2001, 05:23

Quote:

Originally posted by The Viceroy
It would be interesting if somebody (as im at work) could run a monitor in the background (or use CTRL-SHFT-ESC on XP/NT/2000) and watch memory usage ... see if its leaking at all ????

If it was leaking then wouldnt it finally up and crash? I know TCY had a bad memory leak that after a year of simming it would drag system resources to 21 percent free or so before crashing.

As for the turns I havnt seen an AI turn yet last over 3 minutes and 43 seconds in the 3 huge/16 player games that I have actually timed turns with full ani and sound.

Now I do get the wait.... message on my turn every once in a while (in later stages of the game) when I change production or something to that effect but the wait is maybe a minute thirty at most.

Thats on a P3 650, 386mb memory, 1 gig swap not controlled by windows, system set to server, using windows98 SE with a few registry hacks, and a near clean boot (goto start, program, accessories, system tools , system information, tools , system configuration utility, startup. Then start unchecking programs you dont want started at boot up. Its alot easier than it sounds

).

I was wondering if the people who are posting their system specs could post what OS they're using. It makes me wonder since XP already has had some problems with Civ3 maybe there is something else?

Shiva · November 19, 2001, 05:26

Quote:

Originally posted by Blisterz

How do you manage that? when i pic standard map I only get 8 civs to choose from not 16. Am i missing somthing?

If you edit your civ mod file in one of the rules you can change the max number of civs on a map. In the rules look for a tab called "world sizes".

Robert Plomp · November 19, 2001, 05:31

The AI seems to move every unit as often as possible every turn. That takes ages.

I didn't calculate so far how long I'm waiting,
I'm reading books and magazines and I surf the internet while waiting. The bad thing though is that you have to pay attention to the game otherwise you miss any polution or disorder messages

I love the game, but the waiting time is indeed ways too long.

ElitePersian · November 19, 2001, 05:35

Quote:

Originally posted by CyberShy
The bad thing though is that you have to pay attention to the game otherwise you miss any polution or disorder messages

yeah, there should be a status box which lists which cities are in disorder, where pollution striked, and what was built in what city for every turn. that way i would actually surf the net while waiting in b/w turns.

The Viceroy · November 19, 2001, 05:38

Memory leakages do not always show up .. especially if you go and put a 1Gb swap size and the leakage is small enough. Eg, if your leaking 1Mb per turn, and you have 256Mb of ram, of which say 180Mb was free for usage .. you would have 180 turns before you started running out of memory, and then the next 1000 turns using V-mem ... If its only a 500Kb leak, its going to be double the time ... That would explain also why it becomes painfully slow later on in the game ... a simple test to proove this ... when your game gets painfully slow, save it .. reboot .. load it, and time it again .. is it still so slow ??

It should be noted, some people have complained that their system has ran out of V-Mem .. that is usually a good indication of memory leakage.

Shiva · November 19, 2001, 05:47

Quote:

Originally posted by The Viceroy
If its only a 500Kb leak, its going to be double the time ... That would explain also why it becomes painfully slow later on in the game ... a simple test to proove this ... when your game gets painfully slow, save it .. reboot .. load it, and time it again .. is it still so slow ??

Cool, thx for the info

Blisterz · November 19, 2001, 06:02

Quote:

Originally posted by Shiva

If you edit your civ mod file in one of the rules you can change the max number of civs on a map. In the rules look for a tab called "world sizes".

Thanks a bunch

Akaoz · November 19, 2001, 06:17

As far as I can tell it’s not memory leakage. I have tried to re-boot and the wait is still 13-14 minutes.

One poster nailed it though: The game ‘hangs’ whenever culture/trade is changed.

If anyone else wants to take a look at it I can send them a save game... BTW it takes about 10 min to load!

-Alech

Edit: and war declaration takes forever...

Grim Legacy · November 19, 2001, 06:28

Aaah these complaints are so sweet! I was pretty much satisfied with the Civ3 performance of my sweetly clocked P3-800EB @ 1000Mhz... not that it ran like lightning in the modern era, but it _seemed_ bearable.

Upon reading this thread I know I was wrong. It runs like a drunk turtle on systems more powerful than mine! [slaps self] wake up!

So I realize I've found the perfect excuse to upgrade my PC! Yay! What better justification than: "Even Civ3, a isometric TBS game is too much for my current rig, I _really_ need to upgrade ASAP."

No more guilt feelings.