Is it just my computer?

[Samurai]

Hi,

Once the AIs start getting close to 200 ships, my computer takes *forever* to go through the AI turns, and then one or two turns later it just locks up, period (during the part of the end-turn for one of the AIs that has a lot of ships). This keeps happening no matter how I set up the game. I haven't tried setting the ship limit lower than 200, though, because I really don't want to play with that kind of a limitation (for myself or the opposition.) I did try limitng the number of units, but that doesn't seem to help.

Does anyone else have this problem? Can anyone give me some help?

I'm using ver. 1.30 and TDM mod pack.

My computer: Compaq PIII 733
128 MB Ram

[Suicide Junkie]

Is this during a continuous game, or are have you saved and restarted lately?

Try setting the problem AI to human control and passing its turn. Then set it back to AI control for the next turn. This could help.

[Dracus]

I had a problem just like this. I corrected it by increasing my swap drive space. (doubling the max setting and rebooting the computer.) This took care of the lock up. I then added more memory (512meg) and this took care of a lot of the slow down. Still sometimes the AI takes a few minutes to run. I think this is because after I have made a large number of ship movments, it tryes to determine if I am within it's attack range, based on the supply issue it has and it's ships location.
I have seen (while running 15 Ai races) a seen AI take up to 2 minutes to complete it's turn(thought my computer was locke dup again). then some would pass quickly then another would take some time. Then On the next round of turns, they all run quickly.

[raynor]

I remember someone saying they thought the game ran really slow if you have CD Music turned on but don't have the SEIV CD in the drive.

[Daynarr]

A really large slowdowns happen when AI is engaged in combat with large amount of ships and units. This combat can really take a while and doesn't happen too often, so I would suggest that you wait longer (take a coffee brake or something) and then see if the game will continue. Of course, I would suggest that you take Dracus advice as well, because swap file is important with this game (I have 200 MB swap file). As and addition, you should do following things as well in following order (after increasing swap file):

- Check your disk integrity with ScanDisk or better (like Norton Disk Doctor if you have Norton Utilities)
- Use Disk Cleanup to remove all the useless files (like .tmp files) from your hard disk.
- Defragment your drive with Disk Defragmenter or better (like Norton Speed Disk). This may take a while but it increases your system performance and stability greatly.

ScanDisk, Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter are located in programs\accessories\system tools.
If you are lucky, you will have Norton Utilities and have much better tools that the ones included in Windows 98.

[Arralen]

I assume you are using either Win95 or Win98 ..
All this "clearup" thingies could help .. for a while, or sometimes.
Adding more RAM could help .. for a while, too.
What most likely the real problem is, that your drive Cache eats up all available RAM .. per default it keeps growing and growing until there's nothing left (at least with Win9x).
If you have the "system utilities" (IIRC) installed, you may look for sysmon.exe .. let it display "free RAM" vs. "Cache size" - most likely it's 50kb vs. 120MB or something like that.
How can you correct this?

Use "start"->"run"->"sysedit", and add the following lines to your system.ini

[vCache]
MinFileCache=4096
MaxFileCache=25600

.. that will give you -guess- 4..24 MB file chache, mostly sufficient ...

Remember, this is not the same as "swap drive size", but frees RAM for running programms instead of forcing more disc access.

Hope this helps

Arralen

[Samurai]

Thanks for all the tips. I'll try all those that apply later this afternoon. Again, thanks.

[DirectorTsaarx]

I'm using a Pentium II, 266 MHz, 64M RAM; and swap space on hard drive set to 128M. I think the longest AI turns I've seen have been 1 to 2 minutes, max; and that was when each AI had 100 - 250 ships (I set the limit to 2000). But it hasn't locked up yet. Of course, I also only play a couple hours at a time. I also only use the standard 1.30, no mods (well, except for adding a few production bonuses for high populations, but those only apply to populations above 10B, which doesn't happen often ). I'm also using a 255 system galaxy; CD Music turned off; max AI's, and max neutrals.