Yeah, I'm sure I am. But going by the recommended specs, my system should be able to handle it. Like someone mentioned, there's room for improvement but it is a fairly good computer.

I can see now that a dual-core would probably make a big difference. GalCiv is actually one of the few games that are desinged to make use of them.

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.

The published specs for the game may not have changed all that much, but the game's requirements certainly (and obviously) have (changed that much).

There are so many factors to consider with DA over DL, it is not surprising that the game now takes both more CPU cycles and memory.

Truthfully, I have always considered the published requirements to be well (actually VERY well) below those of optimum requirements. Probably a result of this 'lowest common denominator' world we live in now - but, the specs should be laid out in terms of Least, Adequate, and Optimum - instead of Minimum and Recommended.

But, that would not really be in staying with Political Correctness, now would it?
It would scare too many away.

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.

Thats the truth!! The game is largely playable, but I turn all the details way down, shadows off, etc. The result, is a rather ugly but still very enjoyable game!!

Clearly games have outstripped CPU technology. Oh well, I guess games are the driving force for enhancing this technology.

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...

This is true, however the 3800+ can be overclocked to around 3.5 Ghz if I remember the specs correctly. I also believe the 3800 runs around 2.2 Ghz in normal operations. Cool and quiet takes it down to around 933 mhz while the system isn't demanding too much from it. Not that any of this helps you, just random info on your processor.

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 like Zone Alarm, it's constantly popping up windows and getting in the way when it's updating. At least Norton is discrete when it does it's thing and there's no reminders or announcements for this and that. It just quietly does it's job let's me know it's finished in an unobstrusive way. The public system I was using had Zone Alarm, and I was constantly getting annoyed with it.



I just let Windows deal with that. It's currently set for a minumum of about 2 gig and a maximum of about 4, which should be plenty with my 2 gig of physical RAM. When I checked the Task Manager the game was using about 1.6 minimized, so there's lots to spare. In fact thinking about, it seems the game should have at least 4 gig of physical RAM. Having even that much being used in virtual memory is going to slow things down considerably. Unfortunately I can't afford it right now.



Maybe it's just a relative thing. What you find acceptable, I find annoying.

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.

A few things to consider that I didn't notice anyone else mentioning.

1) Do you have the Allow AI to use extra CPU cycles option turn on? This does exactly what it says and on a non dual core machine it will slow the game especially with all the AIs you've got in game.

2) GPU Throttle. On or off? This had more to do with crashing due to overheating the vid card then anything else but it can be an issue for performance too I think.

3) Norton. Ok this has been mentioned but I felt it needed to be repeated. Norton kills performance. Period. No discussion. No ifs, ands, or buts. I never understood the need to have antivirus software running constantly. A firewall is all you really need to protect yourself from about 90% of junk out there. And the best place for a firewall is on your router not your PC. The other 10% can be avoided by simply never opening an email that says something like *Hey click here to win $10000*. If you feel you are at risk for a virus then run the scans manually over night or something. Also shut off any *automatic* update features or at least configure them so they run only at night or something. This is another *novice* PC user mistake that can bring your system to a halt.

4) Page file. You should have roughly 4x your available RAM as free HD space. It cracks me up when someone has a HD with like 2 MB free left out of 120 Gigs and then wonders why their computer won't run.

5) XP or Vista? Vista right now isn't exactly the most game friendly OS. This will change but for right now avoid it. XP isn't exactly the best either but if you know what to shut off it can be efficient.

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?

Go to the link below and download this program for knowledge of what is running on your system. Once running your can have it comeup when ever you run the normal MS program. Also right clicking on a listed program and Kill process for anything not absolutely needed then run the game to see if that helps.

I will not bang-a-gong about norton some people like it some do not, but I am running it on my system and have no problems. I also have the AMD FX-57 running at 3.0 with a standard fan, 2.5 Gigs DDR2 400 RAM and 256 meg ATI GC, and have no problems.
There is something system endemic to work on for you.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx and also get this...
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/Autoruns.mspx
Good Luck

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.

If you haven't already, run msconfig (it's built in, just start->run->msconfig->startup tab) and review what is starting up on your system. There is often a thing or two you can out and out whack. I also kill everything not needed for GC II prior to launching. Leaves me with 1.8Gb+ real memory free before starting the game. This was helping a lot on DL. DA does appear to require more than DL though....

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.

Hmmm... now save game load times are something different. There was an issue with DL (I forget which version) where it was taking a long long time to load things. This was a bug that was eventually found and fixed. Not saying it is same thing but there is always that possibility. Might want to create a thread specific to that issue with actual times to load. A quick fix could potentially be a drive defrag. I've found at times that doing this clears up my save game load times.

And lets be fair here. A map with 500+ planets does not mean this game is a resource hog. It simply means that if you want to have 500+ planets you'd better be prepared to have some slow down.

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.

I turn off my cable modem and stop all the networking services before running GalCiv2. Not only does this free up resources better used by the game but also assures that I'm not being hacked!


With my free AOL account as an AOL employee I get McAfee. Prior to that I used Avast! which like AVG is free for personal use; both have good reputations.

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.

Yeah, AVG and Avast are both adequate. Avast seems to have almost no system impact at all, but from what I have heard relies heavily on defs, so it won't catch new stuff (granted, probably good enough considering how up to date they keep those defs). AVG, well it is good enough as long as you stay away from the dirtier parts of the net (like crack/key sites). A coworker of mine who frequents those places and used AVG had Active Virus Shield find a number of viruses when he changed to it, viruses that AVG didn't even notice. From what I hear its heuristics aren't great either. Don't even get me started on McAfee. they lost me back when Norton was still decent (i,e. circa Win95). Kaspersky's commercial offerings get really good reviews, and Active Virus Shield is based off the same engine, and gets updated several times daily. I've also heard good things about Panda and NOD32, but I have never tried them so I can't speak from experience.



Oh yeah, I forgot about that, it has been awhile since I used it personally, since I got Symantec Corp Ed from my school, and later moved on to active virus shield when certain updates were only being made availible for later versions. Personally, I kinda think they have done that work around because IIRC Symantec didn't want the subscription model anyway, they were kinda harassed into it by McAfee (another reason I don't like McAfee) complaining how it was anti-competitive for them to give out updates for life.

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.

okay, I'm apparently not the only one with problems with DA.
I have only one question: What are the specs on the PCs the Devs use?

Considering they have to see the algorithms on their PC, I assume they have no fog of war. Which means they have to display every ship, every planet, and every asteroid. They must have a super computer to have DA run smoothly!!  

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.)

The PC game companies are in competition with the consoles. There you have near-video quality graphics that are setting the standard. If the PC developers were to make games that can run on video cards that are hopelessly out-dated, they'd end up looking like crap and the companies would be out of business very soon. Game consumers expect much more these days in terms of visual appeal, myself included, and the developers need to respond to that.

And why should they have to limit themselves to old technology simply because people aren't willing to upgrade their systems every so often? Computer technology is evolving, becoming more and more powerful. Why shouldn't game companies embrace that in their products? I hear this argument over and over these days in various game forums, by people who simply refuse to accept that standards in the computer industry are much higher these days. If you want to stay relevant and be able to continue play the games, you will have to make an attempt to meet those standards. Yes it takes money to do so, but that's just a fact of life. If you want a new computer badly enough, you'll come up with it. There's even stores that will let you lease systems for a low monthly fee, if coming up with the full amount is a problem.