Alternate settings for advanced hardware?

from Stardock Forums
When I started my first game on the largest galaxy type, I noticed that the delay was already that of some of my heavily populated games, so I started poking around.

First, I see that the game keeps my processor (AMD 1600+ on an nForce2 board) pegged at near 100% even after sitting in steady state for a long time. I turned off music and sound effects which did cut the disk access to near zero. I see that the game has a memory footprint of about 152MB. I have 1GB at the moment and it's not even 1/4 used.

Questions:
1. Do other people see the game dominating their processor (kept at or near 100%) with faster systems? (i.e. perhaps it's time for that upgrade)

2. Is there a setting to take advantage of large amounts of system memory via better caching? If there isn't, that would be a nice touch. System memory is dirt cheap right now. :-)

Thanks,
PJP

~SDC~
268 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
I have a p4 2.8
g4ti4600
512DDR 333 RAM
soundblaster audgey 2
And I forget the motherboard

The game still suffers from slow down. and after disabling the music and sound effects it crahses a lot less but has not had much of an effect on speed, On a larger map it has the effect you decribed above. although it dosent seam to slow down all that much as an avid gamer I do fined it bothersom to have of all games this suffer from slowdowns. hell SOF2 and Morrowind don't show me the kind of choppynes this game showes me.
Start11 - Customize the Start Menu and Taskbar in Windows 10/11.
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
It's the multi threaded AI at work there, and it doesn't matter how much memory you have I think. The game simple consumes as many CPU cycles as it can and continues to plot your demise... or maybe it just gets stuck in some infinite loop LOL

My experience is that after ships finish their auto-pilot moves, the AI computations kick into high gear and my game just slows to a crawl. I can often count the animation frames of starbase and resources. One work around for me is to try and manage my colonies at the begining of the turn instead of towards the end. Maybe you can try that out and see if it helps.
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
p4 3.06 ghz, MSI GNB-MAX mobo, WIN XP PRO, 1 gig RAM, WD 200 GB 7200 RPM SE drive with 8 MB cache, Radeon 9800 PRO, no slow down, none, zip, nadda, zilch

(cheesy grin) LOL

Sorry, I shelled out the bucks so I like to gloat a little.
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
The amount of computations seem to increase with map size and AI difficulty level. Try starting a gigantic masochist game and see how it performs. I suspect even the best systems on the market will begin to experience slow downs as the game progresses.