[Bug] Caravan Problem

Yes, the lag is really bad.  A different problem related to caravans that also scales badly is that they have a maintenance cost.   Since they spawn in large numbers (I had 118 for ~10 cities) this is financially fatal.

Just to confirm, are both of you actually seeing caravan movement?  I get caravan movement animation and I get slowdown, but another tester who has the no-caravan-movement-animation bug doesn't get any slowdown on the same savegame.

This could help narrow down exactly what's going wrong.

Yes, I see the caravans move.  There is a bit of a lag after the turn as it increases, but they do move.

Are you saying the lag is between turns? 

Or is the game lagging if it is just sitting there?  Or both?

I just tried again because its been a few days.

The first time it crashed, but there was no memory dump

The second time, I started to notice a slight slow down around 7 cities connected by caravan, by 10 it was slow enough that it wasn't playable in terms of it being fun.  When pressing the end turn button it stayed yellowish for between 0.5-1 seconds, which isn't bad, but the graphic animations become very jerky/jumpy and after the 10th city the soveign's icon was starting to disappear and reappear.

I'm not sure if this is intended, but when two cities connect they exchange a pair of round tokens, and the two tokens stay there, then one token starts moving between them.  The initial ones stay there forever.

At the end when I checked the memory usage, it was at 718 M.  I didn't track the memory usage at each stage.  After going to the task manager I couldn't get back to the game (and there wasn't a memory dump that I could find)  My machine is running XP with 4GB of physical memory.  The only other thing I was running was impulse.

Another thing I didn't do the whole time was count caravan tokens, but at 7 cities connected I counted 20, and at 8 between 30 and 33. 

I'm not sure if it makes a difference, but when setting up the roads I connect each new city only to the last city that I conquered.

btw, it seemed to take longer this time to get it to perform poorly, and the between turn aspect didn't seem as bad.  This time I was only building roads.  Last time I was building buildings in all of my towns and doing other game type stuff.  Tonight I was just trying to get some more specific info for you.  IIRC, the lag was between the time I hit end turn and when the various dialog boxes would popup saying that such and such was built.

The caravans were moving and the lag was while trying to scroll, select, and move units.  If there was lag between turns, I didn't notice.

CodeCritter, the caravan lag I saw is mostly an end-of-turn phenomenon (or perhaps a start-of-turn thing, we can't really tell the difference), because that's when they move.  It also appears to be primarily related to the graphical rendering of the caravan movement, because if a tester has the caravan-markers-don't-move bug the slowdown doesn't happen.

The game in general gets slower as it goes along and I get into dozens of cities, and I think the huge number of caravan units is related, but I think it's a separate bug.

I don't know what is the planned purpose of the caravans, but as it is now they appear in great number (13 caravans for 5 cities - example, not accurate) and consume a great number of income (10 per caravan). On the top of that they don't seem to provide anything in return.