Why does Civ 3 run like crap?

[Nefrodite]

i have a celeron 850 512mb ram and civ 3 scrolls jusit fine for me, even if i use the keepres=1(i hope thats it..bad memory) to bump res to 1600x1200. i use a radeon. its slightly jerkier at 1600x1200 but still playable, doesn't affect the time between turns which can drag up to a minute with a ton of computers. but atleast the game lets me keep an open tv window so i have something to do while waiting my friend with a athlon 1ghz and a geforce 1 runs just fine, less wait between turns them me and scrolls nice and smooth. my 650mhz p3 laptop 128mb runs about the same as my desktop pc

 

[Nefrodite]

Yeah I agree moonbeam. I'm willing to put in a little time, but the thing about civ games I find is that until you know really well how to play you suck. WIth other games you kind of learn as you go and tweak how you do it and what not but with the civ games if you don't know certain things you suck. Like placing a town for instance. I place it where it looks like it would work out but it never does!


yup there is a price of admission, main reason i didn't play civ 1-2.. didn't have the patience if you've played the first ones i guess this one is a snap, but if you havn't, best to go to a bookstore and buy/read the strategy guide. once you've done that you'll be fine of course you can always fumble around hehe.


and yea turning off animations somewhat speeds up stuff between turns, the enemy troops slide around a tad faster it seems

 

[FrontlineWarrior]

attention all sufferers:

you guys are probably running nvidia cards. the new drivers have a problem with civ3. if you use the 12.xx drivers, all problems will be solved... except for the extra fps you lose in all other games. lol

 

[KentState]

The game works fine for me. I'm playing on the largest map with 8 other civilizations in the year 2039. Sometimes the screen scrolls way to fast if I leave the cursor in teh bottom corner when it's time to move. It also blast through turns, but since there are so many units now, it takes awhile. The only thing I noticed was the large amount of RAM that is consumed. It's gone up to 195megs if not more when I've played recently. I do agree though that Civ 3 is just a small upgrade to Civ 2 and Civ 2 played fine on a Pentium I 75 mhz. Go figure ?

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

I use the 12.90 drivers and performance is still lacking. I think the game is just so massive and complex that it really is a graphics hog, even though the graphics themselves dont look that good.

 

[glen]

Finnaly won a space race victory lastnight.
Friggin AI ALWAYS gangs up on me.

 

[duragezic]

Wow I didn't know there was all these problems. Runs fine on mine. None of this scrolling issue you speak of. When you say takes minutes between turns, do you mean when the computer is moving? Mine takes maybe 20-30 seconds there and I got all the animation stuff enabled.

 

[TallBill]

UGH.. just went thorugh this game yesterday... i frickin stink.. at one point 4 countries decided to womp on me for a bit.. somehow i lived... but it was fugly... ended up just winning a default victory... the end was kinda stupid... and all this was on the easiest setting.. guess i just need to play more... and figure out a way to crank out even faster research i guess....

 

[AndrewR]

No noticeable performance problems for me (PIII-933/Radeon AIW/256MB RAM). I also haven't noticed a tremendous waiting time between turns, but I haven't been playing very long and am at the beginning, having just went through the Middle Ages. Personally, I think it's a great game.

 

[TallBill]

btw, i had about 40+ workers.... and turns took 30 seconds or so... just use tactical nukes when the enemies start movin

 

[Dacalo]

I mean, my rig is pretty fast, so its the engine of the game. I am scared to advance to the latter part of game since each turns take so long. :disgust:

 

[Karsten]

Nvidia user here and no problems with the Game. Everything scolls fine (1700+ 512MB Ram)