Norton!! nurf it and get Zone alarm security suite...works a treat! Only runs 1 process and that's for a firewall. anti-spy and anti-virus.

Page File - What have you got it set to? I have 1.5gig of ram and 5.5gig page file, all this with a P4 3.06 and a 7600gt.

I exclusively play gigantic maps and quite often with 9 majors and many minors, sure it lags in the back end of the game, but not so bad as what you have described. I have found it's the page file that makes the difference. Kick your page file up and see how it goes, also run a program like memtest (just google for it) to ensure you don't have faulty ram, though i guess you would be getting a few hang ups if you were. Worth a try anyway.

I think many people is overestimating their PC's today, Their is so much calculations to be done its like running a small but(growing) Super pi program each time you press next turn. the more stuff the longer it takes. and speaking of oblivion that game share a heavy workload to the GPU so its not that demanding on one part. Correct me if im wrong but Galciv dosent use that much Power from the GPU in comparison to oblivion. Its the same thing with the game supreme commander, its not the prettiest game but it sure makes the CPU run for its money.

i have recommended specs and game l---a---g---s
my memory (512Mb, ddr1, i think) is bit old, though

EDIT actually game is unplayble even though gfx settings are low.

Due bit old hardware i'm not going to update it and don't have money for new PC...

I usually play against four opponents on a gigantic map, but with habitability set to 'Rare' so there isn't much time between turns at all.

I don't understand how they can even list 512 as recommended. That should be considered a minimum these days. Xindows XP is going to use up almost half of that on it's own. For any games, 1 gig should be the recommend with 2 or more optimal.

Cyberj914 (and everyone else) -- Thanks for the tips to improve performance. I'm eager to get home tonight and try some of these suggestions.

But... what puzzles me is that performance seems so much worse with the latest patch. I thought I'd noticed that the lag times for loading saved games and from turn to turn in the original version of DA were much reduced from DL. Now, with the latest patch, I can wait upwards of five minutes (or more!) for a saved game to load compared to a under a minute before. Turn-to-turn lags are much worse earlier in the game. Since my computer and its settings haven't changed since the last patch, I can't think of any reason on my end why the game would be slowing down so much.

Anyone else having the same issue?

I haven't tried DA yet but DL with gigantic maps with ~500 habitable planets is a memory hog. Since I only have 512 MB of RAM I shutdown all services not needed to play the game. This include all networking services, printing, receiving input from a digital camera, CD/DVD burning, etc. By the time I'm done my WinXP SP2 system is using ~120 MB of RAM, then I startup the game.

Right! That's one thing I hadn't considered. No wonder it was maxing out my CPU, I told it to! I guess I'll be turning that off until I get myself a dual core.



Are you talking about the Throttle Framerate check box? I'm not exactly sure what that's supposed to do. Though I noticed if it was off, my ship models in the shipyard looked to be skipping frames every cycle, so I've left it turned on. The animation is alot smoother that way.



Yes I knew that, but I'm usually too lazy to turn it off. For most of the games I play, it's not much of an issue.



I'm paranoid? I guess maybe I should just get into the habit of turning it on only when I'm online and browsing. It has caught a few bugs for me over the years, though I have to admit it's usefulness is limited. The few that it did catch, it couldn't do anything about them. I had to manually go into where the file was and just delete it. But at least it told me were it was.



That seems rather excessive to me. I've read a number of times before that it should be 2:1. Which is what I have now, with the max set at around 4, minimum at about 2. And like I mentioned, when I checked, with the game minimized, only 1.6 of the page file was being used. So I don't think that's really an issue.



XP Home. I don't plan on getting Vista until the programs I get start forcing me to. Aside from DirectX 10 I see no benefit in it, and no one's really using that yet.

Unlike others here, I have always gone by the rule of using as little pagefile as possible if you have more than a 1GB of ram. I ran my machine fine for months without even having a pagefile until I installed the Company of Heroes demo. Even then, I only set my pagefile at the minimum the game would accept. Note that I had no problem playing the game, it just refused to even start without the pagefile configured. Windows often tends to swap things out sooner than it should, causing performance problems. Also, I never configure my swap file to have a flexible size, that has often been a recipe for file fragmentation. (Have you defragged recently?)

Also, Norton is a horrible memory hog, almost always has been, the Symantec Corporate Edition is nice, but not free unless you are going to a university that has a contract with them. Lately I have been using Active Virus Shield, it is sponsored by AOL, but written by Kaspersky (who have a very good rep with their paid for products), so far it seems to have only a minor performance impact and is FREE. If your Norton is as old as you suggest, your subscription probably ran out and it is not being kept up to date any longer. Also, AVG is free for personal use and has almost no performance impact in my experience, but it is not quite as secure.

No, the subscription renews itself everytime I do a system reinstall and put Norton back on the machine. In fact, I believe all I need to do is uninstall/reinstall to continue getting updates. The dates aren't kept up at their end, they only activate when you install the program. Strange setup really.

All the time. I think it is to be expected, it doesn't bother me much until it locks up and I have to turn off my PC to get back to windows. Now THAT annoys me. I'd rather have it crash.

I still remember the good ol' days of playing Harpoon on DOS. I'd have such massive scenarios running with ships, aircraft, missles, subs, etc, moving around that I couldn't speed up past 5sec (5sec game time for every 1sec real time). Sometimes I had to play in 1:1 until things settled down. I'd sit there and do my homework or go eat dinner and let the scenario run...now that's lag...



Ditch Norton soonest--if you can manage to uninstall it. It really digs in, see Symantec's site if you need help. I'd recommend NOD32 from Eset for an AV. Super lightweight and one of the highest rated AV programs out there--rated higher than Norton.

If you have Windows Defender, make sure to disable or uninstall it (unless your downloading behavior is unusually promiscious and you catch alot of spyware and virii and stuff). I disabled the real time 'protection' and the process still ran--even if it wasn't doing anything (wtf, eh?). I finally just uninstalled it completely. That bogged down my system more than anything else I've ran for security software.

Also, the newest version on Zone Alarm has a 'game mode' that will supress all the popups until you turn off game mode. I often run it in game mode all the time since I generally answer each popup with 'deny' anyway.

Also, windows tends to get wonky after 6+ months, especially if you install and uninstall software alot. If you know how, just back up your data and wipe your disk and do a clean install. That can do wonders, believe me.

3-4 years ago 512 was just fine. GC2 works fine with it (until i've played one game like 3-5 hours depending on map) And as i said, there's no idea to buy more memory when the computer's hardware is old.
Just gimme 1000 euros and i'll buy new computer.

I'm actually bit upset about that the game doesn't work with the recommended specs if one has the recommended specs

Sadly, it seems that game devs (not [just] GC devs but overal) like just better graphics, not that game can be played with any computer. (Or that a game has good playability, plot, etc.)