Extremely Slow Gameplay

Related to Ships

from GalCiv2 Forums

I've been playing GalCiv2 for a while now, and I've begun to notice a severe slowdown whenever I'm building ships or when there's a large number in play. The complexity of a given ship also seems to be an issue; a Small ship causes little difficulty, but a Colossal one covered in guns has brought the game to a standstill on the map, which is new. I've scrolled out to the point where it's just icons, so the problem only occurs when I click on a given ship (there's some general slowdown as the game progresses and more ships are built, but it's not damaging to gameplay). I have all the graphics options set to minimum, and as far as I can tell meet all the recommended requirements. For reference, I'm running Windows XP on a machine with 1.5 GB RAM, 2 GHz processor, an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 video card with 256 MB of RAM, 14.4 Gigs of free hard drive space, and a 2787 MB virtual memory paging file. I tried installing the Omega drivers, but they caused some minor problems with login (just annoying, I could work around it) and didn't solve or even help the problem, so I reverted back to the ones that came with the card. The issue seems to have gotten worse with time.

Suggestions are welcome, and please let me know if there are any more stats I need to post. Hopefully this is the right forum, as I wasn't sure whether to put it in bug reports or not.

3,395 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top


Since this is a new problem for you:


First do a spyware and virus scan.  You probably don't have any, but it's good to be certain.


Make sure you don't have any new programs, or updated programs, running in the background and hogging resources.  Check the windows task manager to see how much ram background services are using, and what your CPU performance is.


Defragment the disk, but first remove any programs you don't want/need.  The more full a hard drive is, the longer it takes the read/write heads to find anything.  As a rule of thumb, you don't want to be using more than half the total disk capacity.  Once you hit 50%, everything starts getting slower.  You should also run the Windows Disk Cleanup program to get rid of some useless junk files accumulated while web browsing or downloading music or graphics files.


If you have browser plugins like Realplayer and Quicktime installed, go into the program preferences and disable the options to load on startup.  They'll still work when you browse, they just won't take up memory and cpu space when you're not using them.  DivX is also a great one for using resources when it's not needed, so if you have it, disable load on boot for that too.


You might also want to get a Windows registry cleaner if you don't have one.  I use CCleaner (downloaded it from zdnet.com) for the registry and to get rid of even more unneeded temporary files that Windows disk cleaner misses.  As with any registry editing, just be sure to create backup before running it.

Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

In the graphics options do you have "use high resolution ships" checked?  That one caused a big slowdown for me.

Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

The game slows down when there are a lot of ships being built and a number of them are moving.  I notice this starting at around 5000 huge hull warships.  Are your ship counts in this range when you see the slowdown?

My basic specs are Vista Business 32 SP1, 2 GB RAM, E7200 CPU @2.53GHZ, 160GB HD and 512MB GTS250. 

My machine has no extra programs running, so that's not a factor.  I built the machine to play GalCiv2 and it does nothing else.   It has a fresh Vista install on a new hard drive from 2 days ago and nothing besides Avira AV, Malwarebytes AM and GalCiv2 on it.  Before that, it was XP Pro SP3, the AV/AM and GalCiv2.  Nothing else.  I even shut off the network adaptor and kill extra processes unless I'm doing an update, starting a new MV game or uploading a finished one. 

I set my graphics to the "poor" preset in game and zoom out to the icon view while playing to help get around the problem.  Also, before I hit end turn, I zoom to a place on the map that has as little going on as possible.  This is still in the icon view, but not zoomed all the way out.

Once the ships stop moving, it gets better.

Another thing that will help is to fleet up your ships as much as possible.  A fleet of 5 huge hulls is handled like a single ship, so that's like having 5x fewer ships wandering around.

I hope this helps.

Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Quoting charon2112, reply 2
In the graphics options do you have "use high resolution ships" checked?  That one caused a big slowdown for me.
End of charon2112's quote

Thank you so very much. Unchecking "Use Enhanced Ship Rendering" has made the game playable. I appreciate your help.

Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Quoting Arcmyst, reply 4

Quoting charon2112, reply 2In the graphics options do you have "use high resolution ships" checked?  That one caused a big slowdown for me.
Thank you so very much. Unchecking "Use Enhanced Ship Rendering" has made the game playable. I appreciate your help.
End of Arcmyst's quote

 

glad I could help :)