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It's for laptop users

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It's for laptop users

Why did we put so much effort for low end systems?

from JoeUser Forums

Some of my friends who work in the game industry (you know who you are) have been teasing me about why we put so much effort into low end hardware support.  That is, GalCiv II supports kind of ridiculously low end hardware. 

I mean after all, who has an 800Mhz computer?  What gamer has a really low end graphics card?  Those people don't play games. They won't buy games. So why support them?

Our view is that it's not low end desktop users that we're targeting. Sure, they benefit from the work but it's LAPTOP users who play it. Our company's IP attorney, who is in his mid 50s, plays strategy games on his laptop when he travels (which he does considerably).  His home machine is plenty powerful but his laptop isn't quite as powerful.  And we think there are a lot of people out there who do this kind of thing.

Tell us what you think? Does laptop playability matter to you?

95,444 views 88 replies
Reply #51 from Stardock Forums Top
all i use is a laptop for gaming, since our home computer is a mac. i have a couple month old dell multimedia laptop though that is pretty beefy and will play battlefield 2 just fine. but GC1 is one of my favorite games and I have been waiting ever so patiently for the sequel, I've been on this website all day reading whatever I can about the game since I cant get it till later in the week when I can make the 30 min drive to an EB or our local walmart gets it. thanks for thinking of us laptop players though.
Reply #52 from Stardock Forums Top
I have a baseline Dell and that means built in graphics. I added a stick of 256 MB of RAM and now i have 512 MB total...well, really its 448 MB, because 64 MB is alloted to my built in graphics...but my CPU is a 2.2 Ghz (celeron ) but at least it does the job. I cant really play most games which sucks but i get by
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Reply #53 from Stardock Forums Top
Definitely, definitely, definitely YES! It does matter. Low end hardware is just an expression as I think to put all the good things about low-end-hardware aside and forget them, yes, even put them down in a kind of way. I mean if something works well - why bother upgrading? I am so glad Stardock took some time and made GalCiv II low-end-hardware friendly cuzz the truth is IF other game developers would make the effort to optimize their behemoth titles they would all run smoothly on a respectable 1,0 GHz system with let's say the Voodoo 5500 graphic card. We need more ppl who care about consumers cuzz not everybody can affort a new 4-core-Pentium IV along with 4 GB of DDR III RAM to be able to play ONE SINGLE game smoothly. It's beyond ridiculous that some ppl let themselves be torn into the commercial deep river called "The fast/newest is the best". That goes for laptops as well. You guys keep up the good work.
Reply #54 from Stardock Forums Top
Yea It works on my laptop which makes me happy(although it is quite slow )

Now I've got something fun to do while in my boring lectures in class... and because my desktop is broken its all I got right now

So yes, it is greatly apreciated that the support for low end systems is there
Reply #55 from Stardock Forums Top
Well it would be cool to see the difference between my Desktop (AMD Athlon 1GHZ, 768 MB RAM, 19" Monitor and a GEFORCE TI 4600 wih 128 MB RAM) and my newly acquired Laptop ASUS Pro60VC (Intel Celeron M370 1,6 GHZ, 512 MB Ram, Geforce Go 6600 256 MB Ram, 15,4" WXGA TFT Disply).

I run parallel Imperial Glory on both systems and the Laptop won...so far.

Did anyone who allready has it, compare? We in Germany unfortunatelly have to wait a little longer.

See Ya...or Read ya would be better right?
Reply #56 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Your are completely right and forget about your colleagues. Thank you very much that you did your own way one more time.

At home I have an Athlon 800 with Win98, Radeon 9250 (128MB and 128Bit) and 384 MB (Did you ever try to run XP SP2 on a machine with less than 512 MB?. You don't want that. Believe me.) This computer is more than enough for word processing, image galleries, music, tax computation etc.

When GCII would have forced me to buy a new computer I could not have ordered it. As a student I had state of the art hardware. But now I have a family

I have a tight budget and I can spend it only once. Do you want to spend me my monney for hardware or for your software?

Though in the office I have a decent 3GHz machine with 2GB and (unfortunately) Intel onboard grafics and a 22" LCD. Thus I will be able to see all the glory of the game anyway.
Reply #57 from Stardock Forums Top
great, big hug for doing this
Reply #58 from Stardock Forums Top
Absolutely ! I'm an IT consultant which is a job with plenty of downtime ( travelling, waiting for meetings, monitoring systems that probably won't fail, etc ... ), so I tend to play quite a few games on my laptop. I'm lucky that I have a relatively powerful spec ( won't bore you with the details ) that runs CIV IV, Rome : TW and other assorted strategy games quite well at high detail, but it's not nearly as fast as my desktop machine. As such, it's very important for me that the games I wish to play on the move are resource-efficient. Indeed, while buying games I tend to weigh how they will perform on my laptop equally to performance on my desktop.

On a sidenote, some gamedevs should get their heads out of the clouds and take a good long look at the evolving games market : I know many people who play World of Warcraft, or Eve Online, simply because it runs very well on their low to midrange system while other games are barely playable. The same goes for all other Blizzard games, they are always extremely efficient. This widens your customer base considerably, especially in emerging markets like the far East, China etc ... where people are a few years behind the technology curve.
Reply #59 from Stardock Forums Top

I only have a laptop, but it is strong enough for TBS up to now. It's lagging with Civ4, but still capable. So I don't bother... yet. My interests grasp more of certain things out of games, and I DO buy computers for other reasons I know I game I wanted to see the demo: my laptop would not take it so just too bad. Sad, but first things first.


You see, some gamers get jaded or interested by other things... and they only keep up with their favorites, maybe as fervently as before but just with less time to spend. And some gamers just don't have parents buying them a computer every 2 years (some also have slow computers, but good Internet cafes where they became avid "gamers").



my cutie (bought second-hand, 6 months ago):
ThinkPadR50
Centrino 1.6
Radeon 32MB DDR
512 DDRAM
30Gig
See? No big beast, but it does what it's asked and does it faster than my previous desktop (700MHz, TNT2Ultra, 256SDRAM). Priorities change, even if I am still interested in games as games and works of art (with its industry). I'm anything but a classic case though, being ex-centric among ex-centrics, but it might be more common in TBS communities.



 

Reply #62 from Stardock Forums Top
I haven't owned a desktop PC in the last five years AT ALL. I played GalCiv I on a laptop and it's the same with GalCiv II. I since have upgraded to a Dell XPS which is about as "high end" for gaming as laptops go, but I'm still happy that you considered mobile users.

With the way my life goes right now (studying, many different jobs) high mobility is the key for my systems and there's really no reason two buy a second PC (not even for gaming) nor do I have the money for that. I think that an increasing number of people are playing on laptops and I also think that this number will only increase. Mobile systems are on the rise.
Reply #63 from Stardock Forums Top
The performance gap between laptops and desktops has been narrowing steadily for years. My current laptop, a Sager 5720, can blow my desktop's performance out of the water, and it was a hotrod two years ago. My laptop has a 17" screen, GeForce 7800, 2gb of ram, full keyboard, a tiny little built-in subwoofer for the 4 speakers, and plenty of USB ports for me to plug a real mouse into.

Obviously I didn't need the low-end machine optimizations, but other laptop support issues like widescreen format do crop up with some games. I see it less often than I did even just a few years ago though, modern games like Civ 4 and WoW adapt well enough to the laptop.

Galciv is installed on both my machines. At home I prefer the 22" screen acreage of my desktop, but I'm not home a whole lot, so I like to take my games with me. And even sometimes at home I'll play on the laptop, if I'm into a particular map and don't want to switch to a different one.
Reply #65 from Stardock Forums Top
Thank you for making the game useable for people with older computers. That's why I had to skip buying Civ IV.

I just don't feel like spending $1500 to buy a new computer, plus the massive hours it takes to re-install everything that works fine on the old computer, when the old computer does everything I NEED it to do (internet, Word, Excel, even develop ASP.NET web applications) except play games.

And talking about games you can take with you, have you guys considered making any games for the Sony PSP? I bought one (only $250, a tiny fraction of the cost of buying a new computer), but there are no good strategy games. The PSP should surely be powerful enough for a good strategy game, no? I used to play MOO 1, the best game ever, on a 25 MHZ 486, and the Sony PSP is at least 10 times as powerful as that.
Reply #66 from Stardock Forums Top
I completely agree. I have a nice gaming rig but I mostly play games on my laptop (nothing beats playing a tbs on my laptop while I'm in my bed )

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that GalCiv II runs fine on my 2 years old laptop that has a lousy ATI Mobility 7500 card with just 16MB video ram.

The ironic thing is that GalCiv II runs smoother on my laptop than GalCiv I did
Reply #68 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Same here, even though my laptop wouldn't be considered low end, it's still good to see you think about that stuff. That's why I really appreciate Stardock's work. They care for the customers; seriously...
Reply #69 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
For some reason the game plays like a slug on my Dell 8600 w/ GeForce 2 Go 5200... any ideas?
Reply #70 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
For some reason the game plays like a slug on my Dell 8600 w/ GeForce 2 Go 5200... any ideas? Seems like the machine can't handle the graphics at all - scrolling is slllooowww.
Reply #71 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I have a rather average laptop with a cruddy Intel integrated video card, 512, and a 1.7 or so Centrino, and it runs GC2 wonderfully. I was quite happy to discover that it runs well, works with the widescreen on the monitor, and can even alt-tab if I don't mind a bit of chunking.

Of course, I discovered this at about midnight in bed when I idly copied it over from my desktop machine to test it, and some five hours later finally went to bed...
Reply #72 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Havent tried running it on my lappie.. should be fine apart from the 64mb vram on the fx5600.

If it does run itll be great, i spend about 4.5 months a year around the world...
Reply #73 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
OK since you're all basically just saying what computer you have, I'll say this...not everyone can afford to buy a beefy desktop with above a 800mHz processor; I go to a military school and all I have is a simple laptop. Battlefield 2 doesn't work, America's Army barely works, and most strategy games just crawl along. I think it's awesome that StarDock cares about the people who aren't complete geeks and/or get mommy to buy them an Alienware.
Reply #74 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
A resounding YES!! I travel quite a bit and the work laptop is my constant companion. At home I have another laptop (3.2 gHz but only a Geforce 5600 - old driver so 1D8 wouldn't work, but went out to NVIDIA and got the new one to install - HP didn't have it.) and 2 older PC's, 1 of which is a 780 athalon (still) running 98SE. Haven't tried GC2 on it yet, but ran quite a few games on GC1/AP on it.

On another note, I really do appreciate the continuing efforts to tweak and correct the game - even if they come faster than my game completion rate
Reply #75 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I use my laptop all the time, and sure enough if the game didn't run decently on it, I wouldn't even consider buying it. Also, it's a nice move for low end desktop users which are not upgrading often because they can't afford it. Nice game are a scarce resource for them. So, thanks for them too...