"For sale: French rifle. Never fired, dropped once." -or- "Isabella is kind of a ho"

[control_group]

Hokay, so:
I have begun playing Civ 4. I've completed one game, am dominating a continent on Terra circa AD 1300 in another, and have taken a stab at multiplayer. It should not surprise anyone, then, that I am about to ramble on about Civ 4 for a bit. After all, I'm always thrilled to natter on about subjects of interest to no one but me.
The

Comments

[control_group]

I should show you the Civ 3 Civilopedia some time, just so you can see it and hate the new one even more. The previous version was a fantastic information resource. Anything you needed to know about the game, you could find out there, and quickly. The new one is crap-and it's made worse by the fact that they clearly wrote the manual knowing that the real information is in the Civilopedia. So there's an awful lot of stuff they gloss over in the manual, but you can't find easily in the Civilopedia. I hates it.

Buying RAM is a good plan. I'm going to be home this evening, and I intend to play Civ 4 and watch football.

It might also help, incidentally, if we didn't play Terra/Huge/Epic. Your PC might have just been having a scope problem. If we went with Terra/Large/Normal, and only tossed in four other civs, we might have better luck.

Modding isn't a new feature, insofar as there were plenty of mods made for Civ 3. But Firaxis went out of its way with Civ 4 to make modding very, very easy. They implemented almost everything in XML or Python, both of which are very accessible.

Incidentally: I think I've got ~20 icons left. A significant portion of them might be devoted to Civ 4 leaders.

FOR GREAT JUSTICE

[assfingers]

I have a relatively new Alienware PC, actually.

[abmann]

I think the game has a memory leak. I alt+tab out and check it occasionally. The game should NOT be eating 70% of my memory.

[control_group]

Yeah, that's what I've been seeing on some forums, too. Looks like I lucked out with an nVidia card on the graphics front, and enough RAM (so far) on the leak front to not matter to me yet.

[assfingers]

The kicker, though, is that the other game I am playing right now is ALSO terra/huge/epic. It has the max number of civs, to boot. I'm perplexed. If the RAM doesn't do it, I don't know what will.

I bought this for two specific purposes: music management (d/l, conversion, burning, storage) and getting back into gaming. I knew I had to add RAM but had been putting it off for no real reason. Again, if that doesn't do it, I don't know what will.

I might need to teach myself how to mod. I'd like to add guys to the empires they already have (esp American, Roman, and British) and make some empires of my own (Canadian, Polish, Libyan, etc)

[control_group]

It's possible their netcode sucks.

Or it's possible that you're running close to the limit already, and the extra overhead incurred by running a network game pushes you over the edge.

Either way, though, extra RAM absolutely can't hurt.

[graye]

[control_group]

You know, I hadn't thought of that.

Perhaps I'll clandestinely check his PC this evening to make sure he's got auto-resize turned off on the swap file. That alone can make a huge performance difference.

[assfingers]

I didn't do that.

At least, not on purpose.

[control_group]

In some setups, that can make a notable difference.

Basically, you tell the computer to set aside a couple GB of HDD space as a permanent swap file, rather than letting Windows dynamically change the size of the file to meet your needs. This wastes disk space, but drops the performance overhead of constantly resizing a .5 - 3 GB file. If you're using swap space extensively, the difference can be notable.

The key, though, is to make sure you peg the swap file at a big enough size to meet all your needs, or Bad Things start happening.

[abmann]

How does one do this? It may help me out.

[control_group]

Okay, here's how for XP Pro (and it should give you some idea where to look in other Windows flavors):

• Go to System Properties (via Control Panel)
• "Advanced" tab
• "Settings" button under "Performance"
• "Advanced" tab
• "Change" button under "Virtual memory"
• Select the volume you want the swap file on. Then select the "Custom" radio button and set "Initial size" and "Maximum size" to the same number. They're measured in MB. I'd make sure to have at least as much swap file space as I have RAM, and quite possibly double. The only real cost is lost hard drive space.

[graye]

[control_group]

It really is. In fact, that's probably the biggest reason I posted about Civ 4 at all. I had to bitch about the new 'pædia.