slow down as game progress

I experience the same thing. Not just starting, but everything slows down the later the game gets. The tax sliders, bringing up the planet/starship screens, everything. Trading a ship takes like 3 seconds to complete. Most likely Stardock could just tweak their software performance.

I found out it has to do with the size of the universe. I have the next to largest universe and its not as slow as the biggest universe. It just takes a long time to iniatly start up.

wildhare

I played a game with the largest map size, and I did experience slower loads and saves. However, as the above replies state, the more data, the more time! I haven't experienced anything horrible...mostly expected!

OK, personal opinion here:

256MB is not enough RAM for newer PCs, just running Windows takes most of that

I bet upgrading your PC to 512MB would make a lot of difference, and memory is CHEAP these days, so it wouldn't cost a lot to try.

As the game size increases (and in later turns, the number of ships, starbases, inhabited planets, etc), the data generated grows quickly, and if it doesn't all fit in RAM, then it's swap time. And disk swapping is the number one cause of computer sluggishness.

Caveat: I have not played any large maps yet, just got the game last week, so I could be wrong. But with a 3Gig CPU, I'm betting it's not processor power that's lacking in your system.

Crushbone is right. Bought a P4 1.6gz Dell last year w/256MB and recently added 512MB to it for under a $100.00 (probably cheaper by now). That easily tripled my speed in a lot of areas & games. Basically, I got the memory to play BF1942 and the memory addition was well worth it. At the next to highest amount of galaxy, I might have to wait a second or two.

Next thing, tho not so much in Gal Civ is the video card/memory...on me wish list!

There is a slight memory leak in the game though if you play it long enough that can be cured by quitting out of it and then going back in. Usually though you need to be playing for hours on end for it to rear itself though

I have a new P4 2.53 Gig CPU 512 RAM, Ge-Force4 T1 4200 video card. The only slowness I experience is with gigantic maps only. That is only when loading my game really, I notice nothing else at all. There is a slight delay toward the later parts of the game when the entire galaxy is uncovered. All other Galaxy Maps run fine for me! Not sure what you guys are doing with your PC settings but the game is really zippy on my system overall.

There is a memory leak or bug that causes some glitches to occur. Like someone else stated I just quit my game and reload. I notice when I reload that my research time has doubled. This clears up after 1-2 turns on every game I play.
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At 2.53 Ghz, your PC is going to blow the doors off mine. You and I have roughly equivalent ram while the initial poster had only 256mb. Galcivs footprint is about 176 mb, which is going to cause some files on the initial posters computer to go to a swap file, so in that sence, he is going to see a slow down of some sort. I typically play on the HUGE maps, and so I'll see the problem there. I dont see them so much on medium and below, so I submit part is CPU related and part RAM related (256 mb is going to strugle with the larger maps I think)

Perhaps turning the autosave to a lower value will help the performance? I assume the autosave happens between turns, not in the background. So, taking a turn during the autosave round with a gigantic map would take noticeably longer.

More memory is probably the best approach!

Ok this is quite interesting. I have an AMD Duron 800, 32 MB GeForce MX, 768 MB of PC133 RAM, UltraDMA133 7200 RPM HD IDE Raid5 (Striped), and Win2k. The initial load of a saved game on a gigantic universe, near the end of the game takes quite some time (well over a minute). However once loaded I don't notice much of a slowdown on the game at all. It certainly seems a little laggy on some screens, very laggy on a few others, and the ship/planet sliders are slightly 'sticky' feeling. It takes ~30-45 seconds for end of turn to cycle (assuming that I don't have any ships finishing automove durning EOT).

After reading this thread I though I'd try an experiment. I installed the game on one my workstations at work which is a P4 2.4 Ghz, 64 MB Geforce, 10000 RPM SCSI, and Win2k. Normally I have 1 GB of RAM in the system. Copied my entire galciv directory from home to here after making sure that they were both synced up via SDC to latest version. Loaded the same game in ~18 seconds, and it sure is much snappier in feel as well. Sliders are smooth, screen changes are much quicker, EOT planet production screens change nice and quick and EOT took about ~5-10 seconds. Then I took out all but 256 MB of ram. WOW. It ran almost the same as on my home workstation as far as end of turn processing and ship automovement. The screen changes were still fairly snappy, and the scroll menus (planet/fleet) were ok but definately more 'sticky' feeling than with 1 GB of RAM.

It seemed that the biggest impact was system RAM, even on the video portions. CPU seemed to play an unexpectedly small role in performance.