Anyone else finding Gigantic Maps nigh impossible to play on after the first 50 or so turn?

Gigantic maps get slower in my system but far from unplayable. And it only happens from mid to end games, with almost all planets colonized and loads of fleets flying everywhere.

my first game was a gigantic map, it played fine, never had any problems at all. all 9 races on the map and lots of ships.

"My point is why even include gigantic sized maps even they arent even feasible to play on? Is there a memory leak they have yet to fix?"

Maybe your system isn't up to the task. Lots of Civs mean lots of CPU time.

I play gigantic maps on my crappy laptop. The only problem I have is late game if I am zoomed out it takes for ever for the turns becuse I have to watch every ship in the galaxay, this can be hundreds, move.

One thing I do is right before you click turn zoom back in to on of the default views. Or even zoom in on empty space. And the turns will go buy alot better.

Of corse the better your system, the faster the turns will go. But there is only so much the ai can do when it has to move hunderds of ship per turn.

That happens on large maps for me. The only maps I can comfortable play on are medium or smaller, which isn't really so bad. Sometimes I like smaller empires and so forth.

I posted somewhere else that the arceans really mess things up in the sense that they have an insane compulsion to build ships, to the point where in a recent game they had more ships than the other 5 races combined! This slowed things down horribly later in the game, which is why I don't include them in games anymore.

But yeah, I think if you have problems later in the game, try not including any extremely militaristic races, or just one. If you put arceans and drengin in a large or bigger galaxy, you are asking for lag so hard

My system is pretty old, though I do have 1 gig ram and gigantic maps run fine. Of course the turns take longer once the initial expansions are complete and the galaxy is filled but the turns move along fine.

Its all relative though ..what do you define as a really long time?

M

One thing I do is right before you click turn zoom back in to on of the default views. Or even zoom in on empty space. And the turns will go buy alot better.

That's exactly what I discovered today. Zooming in in empty spaces speed up things considerably.

Brad stated in a thread I can’t seem to locate. That the amount of ram you have on your computer will effect the size of the galaxy you can play without endgame slow down problems.

Does anyone remember what his example was or can you provide a link to the thread?

It would be great to get some feedback on reccomended galaxy size based on Ram available or whatever other factors might come into play.

They play fine on my system. Sounds like you'r pc may need an upgrade if you want to play games on a gigantic map, memory would be your best bet.

disabling antialiasing improved my performance for huge games alot

Drop antialiasing to nothing or 1x
Zoom in all the way before ending your turn
Other than that, my Athalon 64 3200 eats through gigantic turns in about 10 seconds or less

MX