Wishlist: turn speed

[brxbrx]

I love Dominions 3. I actually bought it
Regardless, my posting this will undoubtedly be perceived as immature. Of course, if one would accuse of such a characteristic, I would not be surprised, and he could join the bandwagon of those who thus deem me.

Turn speed in this (beloved) game is slower than Oprah's bowel movements. I'm not running some yesteryear computer/horse drawn cart. Granted, it isn't the art's state, but it's pretty danged good.
I'm taking five minutes to get a turn in after 2 in-game years. I've had one where it took me 15 minutes to get through a turn (fortunately back then I knew how to read, and had something to do).
I've read somewhere about speed programming that was going to be implemented in a patch, but was thrown out because it crashed the game. What happened to that idea? I loved that idea!
Obviously MP players shouldn't have such a problem with this, but poor strategists like me need Easy AI like an umbilical cord.
To me, this is like ford saying "If the car stops working, walk"
That is an acute exaggeration.
Seriously- any info?

[trentzero]

1) What's your RAM and processor speed? Any background processes that could be stealing CPU cycles?

2) How big of a map are you playing? Turn processing on 500+ province maps take a lot longer to process than a 200 province map.

[rdonj]

Due to how long it can take for turns to process, I stopped playing on maps that were much larger than 200 provinces in sp. It can be fun to play on a large map for that epic feeling, but it's a lot easier to play on smaller maps. If you're having problems on relatively small maps, you shouldn't be and maybe it's a hardware issue.

[JimMorrison]

I'm running a Pentium D 805 right now (god I hate this CPU+MOBO), and at 300+ provinces, turn resolution takes longer than I like.

I believe the patch was going to enable multi-core use under Windows, as currently Dom3 will only utilize one core of your CPU. Unfortunately, I doubt that it will ever be attempted again.

Best suggestion is to start out on smaller skirmish style maps, and as you get better at the game, ease yourself into larger maps for SP until you find your happy medium between speed and scope.

[Dedas]

Try MP, it is loads more fun!

If you do you won't even notice slow turn generation as you will only get a turn a day for example.

[Tifone]

Number of nations can be a big factor in this. If you play against 14 nations and all of them make an average of 2 battles per turn in the indie phase, that's already 30 battles to process.

[brxbrx]

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3700+
RAM: Over a gig
And my processes are pretty clean.
Thanks for the input, but playing smaller maps, or maps with less nations, is like telling me to eat cake.

[JimMorrison]

I thought it was like telling you to eat cookies.

Or like telling you to lower your settings on Crysis if your framerate is choppy.

Basically you have 2 options, play games that are small enough to process at a rate that you are comfortable with, or multitask. My roommate runs a dual monitor setup and likes to play streaming video while he is gaming. For Dom3, I just play in windowed mode, and browse forums or surf while turns process.

[Edi]

The reason why the speed boost was canceled was that it turned out not to work at all. Getting CTD when starting the game kind of rendered any theoretical improvements moot and it turned out to be unfixable.

Now, I have no idea why you are having such trouble with the speed. I've not had problems with Dom3 at all. Faerun 466 with 20 nations hosts turns in around a minute or so even on turn 50, but the machine has Core2Duo E6600 (so 2½ years old) and 2 GB RAM on an Asus P5B Deluxe mobo.

Does your machine have everything updated as it should? BIOS, hardware drivers (mobo drivers are especially important for this) etc? Is the machine cleaned regularly from extraneous crap (CCleaner, defragging etc)?

The reason it sounds so strange is because even with my old machine, which was a 500 MHz Celeron on a literally lightning blasted motherboard with literally crumbling coils and shot equipment, I didn't get that bad performance out of the Dominions series games. That computer died just before Dom3 came out, but it ran Dom2 just fine and I could maybe hit a ten minute hosting time on it with Faerun 424 an all nations but Ermor on it. Granted that Dom2 is not Dom3, but your machine specs are such that you should be getting significantly better hosting times out of it.

[Redeyes]

In less than a minute?
I alt+tab after 5 sec

That's thee most viable solutions to wait times I have found
15 minutes seems absurd and is far beyond what I even get on my laptop, though its processor is on par with yours...