Rommie2k6

Join Date 03/2006

GalCiv 2 Game Performance... Gets slower over time...

For those who play GalCiv 2 on huge galaxies, do you notice a slowdown in the late game? The time taken to progress to the next turn gets noticeably longer... and load times is well a bit unbearable.

Let's just say that I was loading a savegame of my lategame, and it took a couple of minutes to load. You know that nice music at the start when you load up (the nice song that I have no idea what she's singing), it actually looped TWICE before my game loaded.

One of the problems I find with 4X games is that in the late game, the game performance gets increasingly slower. Is there anything that I can do improve this?

Btw, I'm running a AMD 64 3500+ with 1 GB RAM and a X800XL... so it's pretty good.

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TheRealWarpstorm

Join Date 03/2003

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Well, there are more ships, starbases, rally points, trade routes, developed planets, exposed tiles, and potentially even races, later in the game than earlier. It is obviously going to require more system resources to track and display that.

BTW, that is no longer a "pretty good" computer. It is much closer to an entry level gaming computer these days. (although sad truth be told, it is better than mine).

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Btw, I'm running a AMD 64 3500+ with 1 GB RAM and a X800XL... so it's pretty good.

BTW, that is no longer a "pretty good" computer. It is much closer to an entry level gaming computer these days. (although sad truth be told, it is better than mine).

Huh? Of course that's a pretty good computer. Maybe for hardcore gamers it's a little behind the times, but for a game like this it should not even hiccup on the highest settings. This isn't a first person shooter, sheesh.

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I guess you haven't played Civ IV then, late game a turn can take over a minute to load...

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So my P4 1.8GHz 1GB RAM and GeForce FX 5700 is just a doorstop and paperweight then.

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By rights then, my AMD 1 gig thunderbird with 1.5 gigs of SDram and a Geforce 3 Ti 200 belongs in a museum?

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You know, performance really does depend on what ships you build too. All those polys can make any computer slower. I've got a couple of really silly designs that make my computer run a bit slowly on higher settings:

AMD Athlon XP3500 64
DDR 2g/400 twin Corsair
Geforce PX7800GTX 256mb

This is half dedicated to gaming and half to 3d animation, it performs better with any FPS on max settings on everything than many supposedly graphically less intensive games. Poly counts make a huge difference.

Times the massive poly count in by the factor of a gigantic galaxy with hundreds of ships.... I'd say that it required a high performance machine on the higher settings. Same with Civ4. I think people just expect this type of game to not require much power but this is a whole new generation of strategy games.... they'll soon be vieing for top performance space with 1st person shooters at this rate!

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My understanding of the second half of the game comes from both all the elements moving around and the lifting of the fog of war through improved sensors. It gest very slow for me, seems to be sometime after I build Eyes of the Universe.

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So my P4 1.8GHz 1GB RAM and GeForce FX 5700 is just a doorstop and paperweight then.

Pretty much.

To give a little perspective: I have a P4 2.8 ghz, 1 gig RAM, ATI 9800 Pro 128meg.
Granted built 2 years ago now.
This rig does *not* meet the recommended specs for Oblivion.

It doesn't take long for new games to leave computers in the dust.

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A couple of suggestions,

Just assume that every 5 minuets you spend designing your latest mega ship will add 1 second to the load time, while that ship will probably look cool, remember that the machine still has to render EVERYTHING you put on that ship, including all the stuff you can’t see due to camera angles.

Try to keep your ships in fleet groups, I freely admit to getting lazy every now and then and just letting new ships pile up until I am ready for them After all the AI has to calculate what it does based on every single ship or fleet group that it can “see”, and if you have 10 heavy cruisers in a pile instead of in a fleet, the AI has to keep analyzing every single ship in that pile instead of the 1 fleet group you meant it to be.

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I guess you haven't played Civ IV then, late game a turn can take over a minute to load...

On a AMD 64 3500+ with 1 GB RAM and a X800XL? Uhuh. I played Civ IV maxed on settings with my P4 3.4ghz, 1 gig ram, and a 9800xt with never an issue, and the OT's system may be faster than mine.

Maybe some of you have programs running you don't know about, or spyware. You have to scan your pc after downloading all the porn!

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One of the problems I find with 4X games is that in the late game, the game performance gets increasingly slower. Is there anything that I can do improve this?

Try playing on a smaller map size.

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