Speed of your computers

I think it becomes a bit more complex a question when one factors in the galaxy size. How does that P2-400 do with a late game gigantic galaxy?

The problem is that it is difficult to state ON THE BOX that smaller galaxies can be played on slower machines, (Unless you could say something like "600Mhz (slower machines may be ok for the smaller galaxy sizes)".)

I think you do need to have some statement (like Jack suggested) clarifying that slower machines can play the game on smaller galaxies. I have a 450 w/ 160 RAM and the biggest I can run without feeling bogged down is the large galaxy. With 4Z, it takes forever to get through the first menu, so I have tried to if this still applies....

I have a p4 1.8 and thats really not fast enought for end-game huge galaxy. Having 50+ ships on auto-pilot is a killer. We are using beta with debug on, so I will assume the final release will offer better performance.

I'm running an Athlon 1600+ (1.4Ghz) with 512MB of RAM. By the end of games on a Large map, many ships and Star bases, I am noticing slow downs - nothing dramatic but still enough to be noticable.

my old Athlon 900 is ok on most any map size. Sure it slows down quite a bit late on in a huge map but I can live with it. It may be important to note I have 520mb mem

I'm playing on a PII 300Mhz and a large galaxy. It isn't quick but I'm not in a hurry.

But I would hesitate to play a huge galaxy, though.

Anyone playing Gigantic galaxy?

I am playing gigantic on XP1800+
got 256 megs DDR.
Also I got a very fast hdd so I don't notice any diskswapping.

Ships don't move totally smooth when computer players move, also when I move a stacked pack of ships it doesn't move totally smooth.

Other then that it is very smooth.

I play tiny and small on a p2 400 with no problems. I hold back the larger galaxies for my more powerful machine.

Paul.

I have a K6-III+450 with 256Mb of RAM and it plays nicely on that. Mind you this thing beats a Celeron 600 for most things.

I'm not planning an upgrade until sometime in the summer...

I have played plenty of games on a gigantic galaxy (24*24 sectors) on my 1Ghz 128MB PC and have little probllem until end game. Then, with 300+ planets and 300+ ships (250+ flying around on autopilot) it slows down prettiy bad, 10-15 minutes to handle autopilot and 10-15 minutes to handle project completion. I would expect some improvement when all of the debugging stuff is removed, but ...

Brad, do you think a P3 500 with 256mb RAM should handle things better than an Athlon 750 with only 128mb RAM? What's better when we're talking about what is needed to play the game, more Mhz or more RAM?

I play gigantic galaxies on a P-200 MMX w/ 80 MB RAM, and I rarely see problems that aren't related more to oddities specific to my system (like the fact that I'm running GalCiv off of a USB 1.1 HDD: this is most likely the source of the delays on loading screens and animation) than to the system specs.

It has been a few betas since I've neared the endgame, though, so I may not be seeing the worst of things.

It's certainly not fast, but it's playable.

I have a P3 500 with 256mb RAM. I never play gigantic but do usually play hugh. The the delays are not bad with this size system and galaxy size.

emkcubed,

Your question seems to be asking if page swapping is a problem. I have my system monitor turned on (it came with Windows Mellennium and Windows/98, so I would guess XP has it too) and am monitoring page-ins and page-outs. I have 128MB of RAM on the system board and I don't see any significant page/IO activity in the graph. So my impression is that more than 128MB RAM will not cause any appreciable difference in the performance of GC, even with the gigantic galaxy size with LOTS of planets that I typically play.

So a slow processor only affects the length of delay between turns? Meaning, can I play a huge galaxy with everything turned on with a PII 450 and just have to deal with turn waits?

I am running at P4 2.667 GHZ 512meg RAM, and delay in turns on Gigantic is fairly long.

I have an AMD K7-600 MHz running Win98SE. I had no problems playing large (16x16) until the end-game. While the AIs had only a few ships, things became very slow with each turn taking ~5 minutes each (including my actions). :notsure:

The only speed related issue I'm seeing at the moment is the chunky movie performance. And that only happened with the current build. Before that they were fine.

When I am on bussines trips I play Galciv in the evening at the hotel on my old IBM Thinkpad 770 PII 233 128 Meg Ram WIN2000. I already played huge several times. Yes it takes some time from turn to turn but it is still playable. I found one trick that speeds up the whole thing and that is to change autosave to only every 3rd to 5th turn. By setting it to every 3rd I have 2 pretty fast turns and then one that takes longer. It would be interesting to find out if those of you with very fast machines and still complaining about speed could see the same effect. Then it's not the game as such but maybe the autosave or even a slow and badly fragmented hard drive. But I would stick to the initial recommendation of a p3 600 to be on the safe side for all. If I run it at home on a K7 - 1333 MHz 256 MB RAM no speed problems at all.

I have a P3 800 MHz laptop w/ 512 MB RAM, video is takeing 64 MB of that. I've noticed that the video cut scenes and some animations are choppy. The main screen where the doors open falls into this. Also, it can take some time for turns to happen, especially if there is an UP issue to vote on coming up next. Having played GC on OS/2 for years, the length to take a turn hasn't really bothered me, but the choppiness in the video is next to irritating to me. just my 2c

Have couple PCs .. one using for this is slowest of the lot .. P3-733 .. at largest galaxy size only run into problems in late game. Slow but not dramatically. Have 512MB memory but only old Matrox card .. so could be the graphics card. Below the largest galaxy size no slow down noticable.

Guys, I think it comes down this:

1) The requirements can probably be lowered to probably a p2-400/128M for most gameplay.
2) The recommended machine should be somewhat higher - say a p3-800/256M?

Nonetheless, there should be a warning in the readme.txt of the game that on the largest galaxy sizes turn times can rise dramatically, even on a top-of-the-line machine.

I thinik 128MB is all the ram needed for any size galaxy. I see more paging I/O when using Netscape than I do when playing a gigantic galaxy, even at end game with 300+ planets and 300+ ships. I have a 1Ghz processor and I do see a slowdown on gigantic galaxies at end game, but I think this is just table processing and there may be a way to reduce it if Stardock takes a look at the code.