Slowdown with big games

from GalCiv2 Forums
I've noticed with my current game that its taking longer and longer to load it up. Every time I save, load the game or come back from alt-tabbing it takes noticably a lot longer for the game to fully load. The game is a large or so galaxy with about 5 races and above normal amount planes. I can't say what turn im on for sure, but its pretty far along, probably 500+ give or take a 100. The thing was that at the beginning it took at most 5 seconds to load and a second to save, where now it can take a whole minute to load and a quite a few seconds to save. I was just wondering if this was normal with larger games that have been going on for a bit or possibly something else.

BTW I'm running the first official patch and my computer is 3.2ghz, ati x850 and a gig of ram, win xp. I don't run anything else when im playing except Trillian so I don't think its software. Any ideas would be appreciated.
4,295 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
As the save game gets bigger you have to expect it to take longer. There is more stuff that has to be processed and saved or restored. My games can take up to 3 minutes or so to load when I am playing a huge Galaxy and the game has been running for a while.

I don't run in full screen, I have found it is faster during a game to run it in windows mode so I don't have to alt-tab; but that is my preference. Windows mode forces XP to use a slightly different memory management model so there is no delay when re-opening the window.

Do you have a debug log you can post?
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Judging from some of the dev's previous comments on late-game slowness, it's probably because of the ever-increasing number of ship designs. Both your own and the AI's.
Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
5 seconds to load? Man, it takes me 5 MINUTES to load.
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I notice that after playing galciv2, windows is quite sluggish. After my last game, which consisted of a huge galaxy, followed by some dinking around with the ship designer in a "Battle of the Gods" sandbox, windows reported that it was dangerously low on virtual memory. From my experience, windows acts sluggish after a game of galactic civiliztions 2. After several games, it must be rebooted to restore performance.

--Brad
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
You have to expect some slowdown like that with any game like this. Civilization 4 is also like that for me, so bad in fact that If I don't win before around the time that time shifts from BC to AD I may as well quit playing because of the lag. I have yet to play a large scale game of GC 2, but i expect something similar would happen. The thing on large scale games that run a long time is that your system is having to calculate hundreds of moves every turn, which can slow down even the fastest of systems.
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
i noticed the newest patch also seems to slow down my computer more than the older versions, but it's much more stable (only crashed twice all day yesterday, PQ-0 planets aren't all mercuries when i reloan, and other small bugs seem gone (like the picture for discovery spheres has changed). also i usually leave winamp running too. on that note, since galciv's interface is based on windows blinds, i wonder how much work it would take to come up with a mp3 player plugin....

i think it'll slow down any computer. think about it: there's no unit limit, no polygon limit, and on a large map there's probably thousands of objects plus all the things that need to be calculated each turn that don't have a visual counterpart. my computer's pretty new but not amazingly top of the line: PD-2.8, 1G ram, 128 video, but i'm also running the game at 1920x1200 (widescreen monitor). hate to say it, but have you thought about an upgrade?

i leave mine in full screen. it takes a while to restore after i alt+tab, but it also seems to run a bit faster on my computer. but i don't need to do it that often. i tired playing the game in windows mode, and it seemed slower, but i didn't really investigae that deeply. i have audio buttons on my keyboard that map across all the programs i'm running (if i'm in a screen where you can enter a name, like the unit designer, and i press play or pause, i see a little small circle in the name field). the only reason i need to jump to another program is to change my playlist or occassionally look something up. if you're playing music while you play, i've noticed that mp3s use FAR less memory than other audio formats like wma.