Brad wants 'honest absolutes' so if, as should be the case, players should be able to play the largest maps with everything switched on it looks like an 800 to 1gig machine with 128 to 256ram minimum, probably the upper of the two?. However this may exclude many potential purchasers which is a shame as some of teh medim or large map sizes are just as interesting, and you can always switch stuff off.

It's ironic but it appears that providing an absolute is going to be tough for this game as you can play in so many different map sizes, whereas with a FPS it either grinds along or it flows with a few tweaks to your resolution and a switch of your colour depth until you get the best framerate you can manage vs the smartest graphics.

I think the honest answer is small to medium Galaxy maps p600 128 ram, largest galaxies p900 256 min

My new comp (which I just bought yesterday, and thus am nowhere near endgame yet) is an Athlon 2200+ with 512 megs of RAM. It is pretty darn speedy, compared to my old 450 MHz. I'd say that for Huge and Gigantic recommended system should be around 1 GHz with 256 MB.

Asmodean

Care must be taken to ensure that someone will not pass GalCiv up because they think their machine does not have what it takes to run it. When you recommend saying it "requires" 256MB Ram, make sure it needs it. If it will run fine with just 128MB, use that figure instead. As I have mentioned many times already, the key to how much system board memory you need is best determined by how much paging I/O the game causes. If it doesn't cause any significant paging with 128MB, then go with 128MB. Arbitrarily bumping this figure to 256MB will cut into sales UNNECESSARILY.

I have been running GalCiv on my LapTop since the first Beta's and the improvement is remarkable. My LapTop is a PIII-650 with 320Meg of Ram with 8Meg for Video ans XPpro. All of the Video's run fine with no choppy except for the Doors Opening in the first screen. I haven't played a Gigantic lately but on the huge game that I played last night the only time the turns took more than a couple of seconds where when there were multiple events happening all at once (Ship Movement, Project Completion, Diplomacy Screen) and then for only 5 or 6 seconds. I think honesty should be priority number one as far as system requirements, I hate to purchase a game and find out that yes it will run on my system if I turn off every single graphics option, even though my system is well above the minimum requirements.

Chris

I'm running on a 1.2G Athlon with 768M. On a 24x24 galaxy late games really slow down for research completions, survey ship wormhole events, and whatver is going on after clicking done after a successful invasion of a system. Seems like none of those events should be video related, so it might be something else.

John,

Turn on your system monitor and add the page-in and page-out charts. I have been watching these graphs intently since the gigantic galaxy game I played that slowed down between turns at the end. Since I see no page I/O activity during this time, I think the slowdown lies somewhere else, perhaps in the table structures, perhaps in how the code traverses the tables, perhaps somewhere else.

But one thing is clear from my observations: 128MB is currently enough even for the biggest of game settings available on Beta 4Z.

Jack, I'm not seeing any paging activity either.