I'm sure it's been reported here and there that performance gets to be an issue when you get toward the end of games on the larger maps. I noticed something rather striking when at one point, I adjusted my military slider to zero. When I did that, the performance got ALOT better. So this begs the question of why it is so much slower and what is it about military that's dragging it down.

Now based on a few things I'm seeing, I don't think the bottleneck is the AI. It seems to be doing okay on its own. But one other thing happened that made me wonder. Toward the end of this aforementioned game, I gave away something like 15 defenders to a minor civ. When that happened, my computer froze for 2 to 3 minutes.

I find this stunning since I'm on an Athlon XP 1700 with 512mb of RAM. (Galciv's memory footprint is only about 180mb, so it fits entirely in memory)

It seems to me that Galciv slows down when it is either inserting ships into your fleet, or moreso when moving ships from your fleet into the computers. Being a software engineer myself, I find it strange that it should take slow long to move a collection of say 15 objects and stick them into another collection of only maybe 5 objects.

The only thing I could think of that maybe slowing things down is that there's a sorting algorithm going on when these kind of transfers take place, but the Big O of moving ships into a fleet or transfering them shouldn't be that big, unless these ships are presorted in some way. The operation should be quick, even assuming a doubly linked list how the ships are organized, because these are mostly straight integer type operations.

I also noticed the same thing when giving away planets (which seems to cause worse problems). Again, you should only need to move objects from one place to another, which shouldn't be *that* expensive of an operation.

It would seem to me that something like this can be fixed, unless there's something else associated with these moves that I'm not privvy to. Is there a way this can be fixed?

SeanB