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The Big Game

The biggest maps, the most factions, the slowest research

November 16, 2016 5:57:54 PM from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

So,  apparently there are a lot of us out here who like to push the game to its extremes. One of the as-advertised features of GC3 is that you CAN play the Big Game. In fact, I play it on a relatively modest laptop. So, thoughts on the Big Game? What works, what doesn't, any tips, any problems.

 

So far, recent posts on other threads seem to agree that there are interface issues and general management is a huge problem in the Big Game, and late-game crashes seem to be common. I find the tradegoods loophole is really unbalancing in The Big Game because of all of the factions, as is the AI's shyness about resources. You run out of minor races really fast relative to majors when you max out the factions. I also think I'm a worse player than most, because I've played so few individual games.

 

Thoughts?

 

 

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Syrkres
Join Date 04/2005
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Reply #1 November 16, 2016 6:35:30 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

Right now my biggest problem with Insane games is the lag and the crashes.

I have what I consider a decent rig:

  • i7 4790k CPU
  • 32GB RAM
  • GeForce GTX960
  • HardDrive standard (used to have SSD's but didn't see a big difference in most games).
  • Windows 7

 

In mid/late game (200 turn range) the game regularly takes up around 25GB ram. I just cleaned out my old saved games and started a new one, but will show memory profiles once I get up there again.

 

Normally play with around 50 races on insane maps with second highest INT rating, anything much above that makes it a lot worse.  One thing I was thinking about was Image sizes for factions and wondering if they are all loaded into memory or swapped in as needed (since you only view one faction at a time).

I can deal with the slowness (to an extent) but the crashes is what bothers me. 

 

Mods I play with:

  • GRM
  • More Anomalies
  • Planet Diversity
  • GlobalSedition (private mod - mainly new faction, solar system, planet)
  • Pharaonic Malignity (faction mod)

 

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Reply #2 November 16, 2016 7:19:38 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

Quoting Syrkres,
reply 1

GRM

GRM is a must! I was gonna ask how people got their factions. Mine are GRM, many of Seilore's factions (I need to send the modified versions... d'oh!), a handful of my own, and I'm adding Hereward Hills' next time. I also raided the old runner-up factions from the faction contest, and modded in the remaining races from GC2, the Xendar, and the Stellar Guild (yawn). I'm up to around 40 factions, but I need to go back and edit a few of those.

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Larsenex
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Reply #3 November 16, 2016 7:46:57 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

I play only on insane. I play with Galactic Star Trek mod and leave out GRM which I do like but there was an issue that I did not feel like dealing with. I have an I5 with 16gig ram, GTX 970 all mounted on a Samsung 850 EVO SSD. 

 

I have never had a crash nor slow downs. My current game is turn 493 and I am working towards a domination victory as that is the only one I enabled..hehe. 

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Publius of NV
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Reply #4 November 16, 2016 7:53:57 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

My old laptop died not too long ago, and its replacement now has enough memory (32G) to try an insane map, so I'm currently playing my first game on a map that size.  I didn't know how many opponents to play, so I set up about 20.  At 110 turns into the game I've only met 4 of them (plus 4 minors).  At the rate things are going I might win a research victory before meeting all of them.

Which brings me to my question for those of you who have played more than one game on insane: Do you have research speed set to normal, slow, or what?  Are there other starting settings that you can recommend for insane maps?  Thanks.

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Reply #5 November 16, 2016 8:08:42 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

Quoting Publius of NV,
reply 4

Do you have research speed set to normal, slow, or what? 

 

I don't consider it really a 'big game' unless I am slowing research, but that's just for me personally. I always play with research on the slowest speed. It stretches the tech trees out nicely, but it does seem a lot faster than in GC2 or Civ5. I could just mod that...

 

I would not set anything (stars, planets, etc.) on rare, because the galaxy gets awfully lonely...

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Reply #6 November 16, 2016 8:10:21 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

Quoting Publius of NV,
reply 4

Which brings me to my question for those of you who have played more than one game on insane: Do you have research speed set to normal, slow, or what?  Are there other starting settings that you can recommend for insane maps? 

I normally play on tech rate very slow, however, with that few of factions even a very slow tech rate at an abundant planet setting will get you researching crazy quick.

Other than that, I feel Lars is in the minority as anytime I play with 80 + factions I get major slow downs and eventually unrecoverable crashing (mind you this all was prior to 1.83 as I haven't gotten that far in 1.83)

I'm using the following specs 

AMD FX 9370 8 core CPU

Radeon R9 270x 2GB GPU

16 gb memory

500 GB SSD

I never have any memory usage more than 10-12 GB (with the Windows memory included)

 

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Reply #7 November 16, 2016 8:25:38 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

My specs are as follows:

i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz (8 CPUs)

32G RAM

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M

500G SSD C drive, 1T SSD D drive (where Steam games are installed)

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androshalforc
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Reply #8 November 16, 2016 11:30:44 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

Quoting Publius of NV,
reply 4

Do you have research speed set to normal, slow, or what?

I find that the way its implemented the research speed setting is actually pretty much useless, its noticeable for the first dozen turns but after that its pretty much a insignificant

I mentioned this on a post and treborblue built a nice tech cost multiplier i multiply the base cost of techs by at least 10x

http://www.nexusmods.com/galacticcivilizations3/mods/73/?

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Reply #9 November 16, 2016 11:31:21 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

double

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mortili
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Reply #10 November 17, 2016 1:56:17 AM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

I usually play on insane with ~10 Factions, anything more than that makes it far to crowded,

i also dont play with all abundant, i try to set it so i get ~20 Planets per Faction.

 

Dont got Problems with crashes, but usually at around turn 100-150 ships start moving really slow -.-

Mods: Informative Diplomacy (Edited), MPGC3 (mostly AI stuff)

 

Specs:

i7-4770K

24GB RAM

Sapphire Tri-X R9 290 OC

250GB SSD

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Reply #11 November 17, 2016 1:53:55 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

Ok, 

here is my latest game - Turn 178, Insane Map, 50 Factions (+ me) with the AI set to second highest.

I only have a total of 11 planets and currently "pinned down" as most known factions are at WAR with me.

 

As you can see my memory used by GalCiv3 is 28G, almost 29G.

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Reply #12 November 17, 2016 2:41:40 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

And here I am 10 turns later (turn 188) same game. Up to 31G....

Talk about a lagged game....

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Reply #13 November 17, 2016 2:57:16 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

And 4 turns later(turn 192) it's at 32+G and quit game as it was too slow...

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Reply #14 November 17, 2016 3:36:41 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

Quoting Syrkres,
reply 13

And 4 turns later(turn 192) it's at 32+G and quit game as it was too slow...

To me seems like a memory leak somewhere as I've never had mine jump more than 13 gb...  maybe something w/ your system IDK I'd recommend creating a ticket.

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Reply #15 November 17, 2016 3:50:31 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

Quoting ,
quoting post
...and late-game crashes seem to be common...

 

Wow, that's quite a leap from personal experience and reading a few posts to generalizing it to "be common"... I can count on one hand the number of CTD that I have experienced playing this game since day one. I literally have over 2400 hours invested in game play and play on the top four sizes of maps only with typically 25-30 major races with all minors. I've gotten as far as 700+ turns in one game. I don't think it's as common as you believe it to be.

 

EDIT: to fix typos...

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Reply #16 November 17, 2016 4:01:38 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

Quoting Syrkres,
reply 13

And 4 turns later(turn 192) it's at 32+G and quit game as it was too slow...

Wow, I've never experienced this! In my current game, on an excessive sized map with 25 major races and all minors on turn 321 I'm topping out at 13.6gb of ram usage, that's with my also having several other programs running in addition to the game. Turns are fine and the only time I experience choppiness is when I scroll around the map during more intensive AI turns, other than that it's silky smooth. The game is actually running in the background as I type this... I've got 32gb of total physical memory and have never seen it get to 20gb of use yet. Odd how people's experiences can be so different.

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Reply #17 November 17, 2016 4:20:24 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

One thing I think it may be is my Faction images. All my faction images Background/Foreground are 1920x1080 and in range of memory 1.6-2.0M each. So I can since I use mostly my own factions I've created, that they could be causing me a problem. I've thought about trying to test this out, with low res images, but that seems to much like work (since I program for a living) I shouldn't be doing other peoples testing...

 

 

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Reply #18 November 17, 2016 6:13:22 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

Quoting Syrkres,
reply 17

One thing I think it may be is my Faction images. All my faction images Background/Foreground are 1920x1080 and in range of memory 1.6-2.0M each. So I can since I use mostly my own factions I've created, that they could be causing me a problem. I've thought about trying to test this out, with low res images, but that seems to much like work (since I program for a living) I shouldn't be doing other peoples testing...

I don't believe so as I normally play with 90+ factions and the vast majority are custom factions with 1920 x 1080 resolution.  I normally average 12 gb of memory on insane maps.

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Reply #19 November 17, 2016 7:36:53 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

Quoting Syrkres,
reply 1

More Anomalies

This works for you? I can't seem to get it to work. I guess it must be conflicting with one of my mods, but I can't see how...

 

[Edit: This appears to be a mod conflict after all. Yay! Except for the fun I'm having finding the conflict...]

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Reply #20 November 18, 2016 11:00:40 AM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

My name is Erischild and I play Insane.

System

I7-5690

32G Ram 

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

1 T SSD

I am trying different numbers of players and things.  Right now I am actually trying an Immense map against 4 Godlike opponents with Horemvore's AI mod.  We all had sprawling empires when we met each other.  Hopefully, this does not disqualify me from Insane Addicts International. 

I have not had a game crash in a long while.  Except for MP, and that is a different story.   My turn time delay in this game is mostly the sound cue that a starbase has upgraded itself and requested another upgrade constructor.  After that launch sound happens 2 or 3 dozen times per turn, (I have over 600 starbases.) I don't notice any other delays.  I am at turn 225 which is further than I usually get because I go research heavy for a quick Tech victory.  I am trying for a Conquest on this Immense map for variety. I prefer more wide open maps, but have done up to 48 opponents on Insane.  There was some noticeable delay between turns in those games, but that was several updates ago and I can't speak for it on my system these days.

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Reply #21 November 18, 2016 1:32:48 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

Does anyone else have trouble with factions spawning too close together?

I've recently been playing with maps (as a by-product of fixing my mods), and I've noticed that at my settings (common planets and stars, insane galaxy, about 50 factions) I'm having the other factions spawning adjacent to one another. It is an interesting challenge, especially when you spawn next to the Snathi, but a little surprising. I haven't modded the spacing yet.

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Reply #22 November 18, 2016 1:43:10 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

Yes, often when I run 51+ factions I get them very close. If I drop it down to 50 I seem to have enough breathing room (most of the time).

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Reply #23 December 13, 2016 2:31:40 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

I have found that, especially when there are few planets, Diplomacy works as a strong strategy in the Big Game when combined with Tech Brokering. You broker techs to get as many as possible, and trade them to other factions at the "your generosity is appreciated" level until they are allies. As they are taken over, they will surrender their remnant empires to you, allowing you to take over territory without picking fights. Diplomacy and influence usually ride together, so your increasing influence will also allow you to expand by flipping neighbors (and the neighbors of empires you 'inherited'). You just keep building up alliances. Your allies will trade with you at a substantial discount, especially with a good diplomacy bonus, allowing you to build more alliances faster. Later in the game, new factions will meet you and ally with you in a matter of tens of turns, if not fewer. You just have to fight the factions who hate you regardless of what you do.

So far, the biggest problem I've had with this strategy is when another faction buys your techs and uses them to build to a tech victory. Still testing...

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Reply #24 February 8, 2017 2:39:11 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

I just started a game with 98 factions on immense, using my own mod (too many asteroids, damnit!). So far, I'm expanding nicely.

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Reply #25 February 8, 2017 5:07:08 PM
from Galactic Civilizations III ForumsGalactic Civilizations III Forums

Quoting Larsenex,
reply 3

I play only on insane. I play with Galactic Star Trek mod 

 

How is that mod?

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