help -- time between turns is crushing slow

Hi all,

I recently started playing ToA. While extremely fun I am finding that in large galaxies
(i.e. gigantic or immense) that during the latter parts of a game upon clicking my end of turn
button it can take as long as 4 mins or so before my next turn. I have set all my video settings to the "poorest" possible. I have not been running any other app than galciv2 .

As you can see below I have quite a bit of RAM. I even set my pagefile size to a smaller value
to dissuade the game from using it since it has plenty of physical memory. I also toggled the
"force max cpu" optionbut saw no difference. Reducing the vid settings alos had no effect.

Lastly I am running at present the recent alpha (with research progression stabilized) but saw
similar behavior with the official release before that. I also think this is unrelated to other posts regarding the missing turn button issue relate to autopilot / autoattack. Alt-tabbing out I can see that the physical memory is sufficient and the CPU usage is low. Just takes forever to get to the next turn. Help!

Some info about my setup:

3GB DDRAM
Athlon 3500+
Windows XP SP2
Nvidia GeoForce video card
(can't remember which model # but fast enought to run Mass Effect)

P.S. Made no difference when I upped my page file allocation to the OS recommended 4.6 GB. I also placed it on
a second disk drive (the one not containing the OS) ... again no difference. Besides I don't hear my drive thrashing at all while waiting. Maybe it just has to do with having to move tons of ships each turn near endgame.

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Alt-tabbing out will minimize the game, which will decrease the apparent CPU usage.
Using a dual-monitor with Task Manager running in the second screen will yield better results.

'Force Max CPU' will generally result in longer turn times.

And, the larger the map and the more opponents, the longer the turn time will be - especially later in the game.

And if you can't remember which video chip you are running, simply go to the Display Properties and it will be shown.

Another good idea is to post your debug.err info. Your system specs are included in that file, as are many error conditions.

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4 mins for a turn is very long.

I have an Athlon 64 3200+ 1500MB DDRAM Geforce 6600GT and never encountered that long periods of waiting (at the end of gigantic games it took long, but not THAT long). Did you try to update your graphics driver? I read here somewhere that you should do this especially with older graphic cards.

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If you have a lot of ships moving on larger maps late game 4 minutes is not too bad really. I've had turn changes take 45 minutes, but that was with 1600 ships moving during the change. Also if your not already, zoom in to a blank area of the map during turn change will significantly speed up things. When you don't have your ships moving on screen they will use a sort of fast move setup that is a lot quicker.

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Aye, the 'look at an empty/unexplored part of the map' method works well. Until there are battles (which you could turn off AIvsAI battle zooms) and also when your ships get to a spot w/ movement remaining. Other than those 2, looking away makes things work tons faster.

Come time for you to go to war with another massive civ. Get out your DVD collection.

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I have an Athlon 3500+ and a GeoForce 7900GT and 3GB DDR 184-pin.
Video drivers are up-to-date as of a couple months ago.
The behavior is also unaffected regardless of what the video settings are.

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Yeah after reading your and Loupdinour's post I convinced it is ship related.

I was getting four minutes or so when I had about 400 ships moving to various rally points after the Thalan declared war on me near the end of the game.

Once I started decommissioning older ships and compacting fleets and upgrading to more powerful but fewer ships things got a lot better (like 60-90 seconds for maybe about 250 ships in less than 100 moving fleets).

Btw I was already using the empty / unexplored trick, though I was also sometimes hitting TAB or SPACE since I was being paranoid about the missing turn button bug reported elsewhere. I think I'll stop doing that and get a book to read while I am waiting. Maybe also use a more rally points closer to my home planets to compact fleets then ship them across the map.

Sigh I am guessing Immense maps get even worse.

Too bad there isn't an option to just make the ships "snap appear" at their final locations.

Btw does it help to have the setting turned on where you tell the computer to ignore moves after autopilot? I assume so. Any other settings that might affect things for better or worse (note "force max cpu" makes no difference when moving the hundreds of ships).

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Thanks for posting this. I'm getting slow response times between turns on the tune of two minutes with a gigantic all abundant DL 1.5 game.

I have a Athlon 64 3200+ (2 Ghz), 1 GB DDR2 Ram and a 256 MB Geforce 6600 video card. It appears that I am 200 Mhz off from the recommended requirements.

Is there a sticky somewhere for some tips or would a Stardock guru give us some tips?

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Are all the slow turn experiences on Athlon processors?
I don't seem to recall any with Intel, unless they are very outdated machines.

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Mistralok1

Join Date 05/2006

+22

I have a 3200+ Barton, and I don't have any unreasonable slowdowns. Sure, it can take a couple of minutes to process, but that's not too bad.

It's important to close any background applications; even a virus scanner can slow things down considerably. I also shut down any unnecessary Windows processes and services.

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All single core slowdowns.

GC2 DA\TOTA are multithreaded, and both cores are constantly used, even without "Use max ai" checked.

Not sure about 1.5DL.

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