New PC spec for Dom

JonBrave · #1 July 2nd, 2011, 02:27 AM

Well, I have finally acquired a new PC, after the demise of its ancient predecessor.

It's got 8Gb memory, an i5-thingie-processor, and a sparkly NVidia gfx card. My question is, will this be sufficient for playing Dom? And will the AI utilise all the new processing capacity to come up with better strategies to beat me?

Butler's Medley · #2 July 2nd, 2011, 03:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JonBrave

Well, I have finally acquired a new PC, after the demise of its ancient predecessor.

It's got 8Gb memory, an i5-thingie-processor, and a sparkly NVidia gfx card. My question is, will this be sufficient for playing Dom? And will the AI utilise all the new processing capacity to come up with better strategies to beat me?

Assuming your post isn't a joke, yes it will run. It will f****** smoke Dom3, which would happily run on a 15 year old machine.

AFAIK the AI will behave exactly the same as it would on an old box, though at least turn resolution will go much quicker.

Knai · #3 July 2nd, 2011, 04:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Butler's Medley

Quote:

Originally Posted by JonBrave

Well, I have finally acquired a new PC, after the demise of its ancient predecessor.

It's got 8Gb memory, an i5-thingie-processor, and a sparkly NVidia gfx card. My question is, will this be sufficient for playing Dom? And will the AI utilise all the new processing capacity to come up with better strategies to beat me?

Assuming your post isn't a joke, yes it will run. It will f****** smoke Dom3, which would happily run on a 15 year old machine

Dom3 can choke up even 5 year old machines if they weren't high end gaming computers at the time. Granted, they won't do so until there are massive maps and year 5 or 6 has rolled around on them, but they can still choke them.

As for the AI, the problem there is software, not hardware. AI is still far dumber than we are even at its best, and getting to even that point is very difficult.

JonBrave · #4 July 2nd, 2011, 05:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Butler's Medley

Quote:

Originally Posted by JonBrave

Well, I have finally acquired a new PC, after the demise of its ancient predecessor.

It's got 8Gb memory, an i5-thingie-processor, and a sparkly NVidia gfx card. My question is, will this be sufficient for playing Dom? And will the AI utilise all the new processing capacity to come up with better strategies to beat me?

Assuming your post isn't a joke, yes it will run. It will f****** smoke Dom3, which would happily run on a 15 year old machine.

AFAIK the AI will behave exactly the same as it would on an old box, though at least turn resolution will go much quicker.

I'm not sure what you meant by "a joke", I thought it was a pretty reasonable spec, I really have bought that machine.

With the i5 I understand the PC has 4 cores, so I was at least expecting the AI to consider 4 different lines of action in its turn for what to do.

I have noticed that the battle runs faster than it used to. So now I am thinking that I should adjust my strategy: shouldn't I now concentrate on "rushing" troops, they can get to the enemy archers faster now so he doesn't have as much time to get his arrows to me?

NTJedi · #5 July 2nd, 2011, 07:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JonBrave

With the i5 I understand the PC has 4 cores, so I was at least expecting the AI to consider 4 different lines of action in its turn for what to do.

Dominions is not multi-threaded so a quad-core and dual-core of the same caliber won't notice a difference.

llamabeast · #6 July 2nd, 2011, 08:50 AM

Quote:

I'm not sure what you meant by "a joke", I thought it was a pretty reasonable spec, I really have bought that machine.

He thought it was a joke because your computer is very good, far better than is required to play dom3.

Gandalf Parker · #7 July 2nd, 2011, 09:51 AM

Dom3 is played successfully on laptops so the game itself will be no problem. In fact, the new hotshot operating system you might have gotten with it is more likely to be a headache for Dom3

On the other hand....
some machines did choke with Dom3 on large maps, or many mods at once, or running Dom3 at the same time as some other programs that help to make Dom3's limitations less irritating. So you will be able to run maps, mods, 3rd party programs all at the same time which are designed toward making the AI play better and adding functions to the game that players want. All without getting hosting times that are too long to wait for. So yes, the new machine should be a noticable improvement

Edi · #8 July 2nd, 2011, 10:16 AM

All you need to do is turn the battle detail to "Too High" and maximum grass on and I an guarantee that your new-fangled machine will choke to death on Dom3. Johan K wasn't kidding when he marked that setting as being too high, since it will draw every (separately animated) blade of grass for 10 km out, only you'd need a 10k x 8k resolution to see them...

Dom3 is single threaded, so you won't get multicore processing efficiency out of the new processor, but otherwise everything will run fine if you avoid the above mentioned ridiculous settings.

Foodstamp · #9 July 2nd, 2011, 12:05 PM

On an i7 overclocked at ~4.6 with two vid cards in SLI mode and 4 solid state drives it runs greeeaaat on the highest settings.

But as was mentioned above, it only utilizes one of the 12 cores.

When building for Dominions 3, processor speed trumps all.

Deathblob · #10 July 3rd, 2011, 09:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JonBrave

I have noticed that the battle runs faster than it used to. So now I am thinking that I should adjust my strategy: shouldn't I now concentrate on "rushing" troops, they can get to the enemy archers faster now so he doesn't have as much time to get his arrows to me?

How about on "flying" troops? They will fly over to the enemy archers even faster. Make sure to start them outside enemy archer range, since the arrows might be faster too.