Very Slow Midgame.

It is kindof bizzare for a turn based game to experience lag.

You can imagine why a real time game would lag when you have lots of units moving around simultaneously... but all the units are still in galciv so i really cannot fathom what the hell it's problem is???

I mean if you can imagine playing a game like supreme commander, then when it starts lagging you could give a command... freeze all units except 1, wouldn't that blow the lag out of existance? So yea, i really don't get how galciv manages to lag.

The computer does calculations based on your actions while you play. if you have lots of AIs, there it is.

What calculations? The AI's are inactive during your turn.

depending on your CPU and the settings you have, it's making some decisions about what it's going to do on the next turn. Also ships can have very high polygon counts if customized, that could add to it. I pretty much always play zoomed out to max range in most cases since I generally play on gigantic maps, if I'm looking at something in close I generally zoomed into that area specifically to see it.. so can't help with making suggestions about your problem . Try fiddling with the graphics options, especially if you have vista installed (vista has terrible video drivers still).

I know it rather sounds wierd but it's happening to me. Never happened before with DL. It's pretty bad when the AI are actually moving. The turns may be rather quick but it is slowing down and stuttering at times. Even when I'm not doing anything and just scrolling around the map, the game slows down and the mouse weighs a ton. I haven't been able to complete a game with DA yet.

I play with max number of bots with the difficulty set to cripply, I believe (one of the higher difficulties). As I said, I experience this with DA and not DL.Also, is there a memory problem with DA? It FEELS like it's using a lot of memory on my computer(How do I check the use?).

Open a saved game that runs slow...tab back to windows and open your task manager( crtl-alt-delete) that will tell you how much ram+pagefile you have plus how much your using, it will also tell you how much load is on your cpu.

This game is very ram intensive, on gigantic maps with 9 AI's it will use between 1.2gb-2.5gb of ram... if you start dipping into your pagefiles as ram the game will slow considerably.

I dunno how that can be? Until you finish your turn, the AI is not going to be in a position to consider your actions, since your actions are still changing! That's like trying to use a bloodhound to track a prisoner who hasn't escaped yet,,, huh!

Well I'll just try a game with less bots and see how it goes.

Brad has mentioned the AI will "think " while your taking your turn. That's why if you have a dual core you should get noticeably better performance. The AI will think on one while you are taking your turn with the other core's processor.

Actually i remember seeing posts by moderators saying the AI does not think during your turn, but i don't remember the details. They were talking about DL, so it could be different for DA?

Anyway the whole concept of an off turn active AI in a turn based game seems horribly impractical? I mean it is your turn and you are constantly changing the strategic environment during your turn.... so the AI is going to be wasting recources thinking about things that become irrelevant as soon as you move your next ship!

Well, it could design new ships for itself while you play. I think the reason you get slowdown is because they try and keep a decent framerate, which IS affected by all those polygons on lower end machines.

But it is turnbased. You would think with all animations off you could tell it you didn't care about the framerate and just always play at full speed. Just turn it into a 2d game (which it kinda is anyway).

Don't get me wrong, the 3Dness is super pretty. Sometimes you want the option for pretty to take a back seat to speed, however.

I think the AI doesn't examine the players moves when it thinks. I mean I don't really know for sure, but I have a dual core with advanced algorithms enabled and I get stuff nobody else seems to have seen all the time. I suspect the AI analyzes itself for its best course of action and then if it has extra time it might analyze player actions which it is aware of, but who knows for sure.

I suspect that every time you do something in game, each and every one of the AI will determine whether or not they themselves need to adjust their game plan accordingly.


Just a hunch though.

I experiences similar slow down issues, especially when the maps gets pretty filled, what I did is simply upgrading the memory on my laptop from 512 to 1512 MB. Then I got surprised, the game became very very fast even with the option "allow AI to use max CPU", no waitings and beside that I even could run in the same time other applications (internet, antivirus etc....). I recommend everyone who doesn't own a latest hardware to upgrade the RAM!

I experiences similar slow down issues, especially when the maps gets pretty filled, what I did is simply upgrading the memory on my laptop from 512 to 1512 MB. Then I got surprised, the game became very very fast even with the option "allow AI to use max CPU", no waitings and beside that I even could run in the same time other applications (internet, antivirus etc....). I recommend everyone who doesn't own a latest hardware to upgrade the RAM!