Thanks for starting the Gal Civ III project! Rambling post here..

Why stop at 6?  My new system will have 32 gb if you have it use it lol

I agree, however not everyone has a high end gaming rig. I do not code and realize that as a developer you want your game to be accesible to as many customers/players as possible. This game may just bring PC gaming back for many!

But what is the average end user using these days... For that I wonder to this horrible website Walmart.com being you know the average American shops here and is cheap, you also know that most people don't buy one every year and will buy laptops/tablets over desktops, but I wonder so thinking that they purchased a mid-range walmart pc 1-2 years ago, I look at their current bottom of barrel selection, this is what I found.

We're going to say Windows 7 64 bit,

1-2 core intel processor 1.9  -  2.5Ghz

4-8 GB Ram

Intigrated video/sound cards 1gb

1 monitor

This is not what I hope they build the game to, I would hope they'd target

2-4 core processor above 2.5Ghz but support up to 8

6+ ram supported game using up to max available.

dual monitor support

Just make it playable with the 4GB RAM and my GeForce 8500GT (I know, getting quite old but not fixable any time soon) and I'll be happy. Windows 7 64-bits will fall in place soon (not risking that thing called Windows 8 just in case) and multiple cores are already in. No way I'm adding a second monitor. No space!

I don't understand this one. My understanding is that GC3, just like 1 and 2, will be using Virtual Memory, while the main Ram on a system is Real Memory that holds part of the Virtual Memory. I.e., what I expect to happen is that GC3 will use whatever Real Memory and Swap Space the OS allocates to it as Virtual Memory (the OS "maps" the Virtual Memory to the application's address space as needed, and the app doesn't need to worry about where the Virtual Memory is). So, unless GC3 is going to query the OS for how much Ram there is on the PC and throttle its use of Virtual Memory based on the Ram available (perhaps in a misguided effort to ensure good performance), I would not expect GC3 to care one whit about how much Ram there is available.

Another thing, the Windows versions prior to Windows 7 would not use any Ram above 3G (I think Vista's limit was 3G, and prior versions were even lower). Since GC3 has a minimum requirement of Windows 7, more Ram will be allocated by the OS to all applications if, and when, needed.

Nobody really knows what the "average" user is using, but the closest guess we have is the Steam Hardware Survey: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Some highlights:

- Virtually the entire market has dual core or better (with quad core adoption over 40%).

- Virtually the entire market has 2GB of RAM or better, and ~70% is at 4GB or better.

- ~75% of the market has 1GB VRAM or better. If you go down to 512MB, you get nearly everyone.

Provided the game can run on Intel graphics hardware, you can set the hardware minimums at dual core with 4GB of RAM and be fairly inclusive in terms of hardware.

Vista supported more than 3GB of RAM, in its 64 bit version (in fact Windows 7's innards are not drastically changed from Vista).XP technically supported 4GB, but couldn't use it all for various hardware reasons, and XP 64 bit supported more.

And yes, you do have to care how much RAM is available. If you go to a machine with 4GB of physical ram and try to use 6GB for GalCiv, you're going to absolutely murder performance as Windows starts paging things in and out constantly.

Paging is very, very slow.

Lucky, basically we can code up a game and have most if not all of it 'live' in ram or if not that in cache of ram-drive. Lets say the game needs 2 gigs of ram to page calls. If you can get all of the operations in ram the game would literally fly. When you hit the 'next' turn button you would not have to wait (very long) for it to cycle through. A 64 bit architecture helps far more for this but if you had a 4 core processor with 4 or 8 threads, your 'thinking' if done all in ram would be extremely fast. 

OK, guys. Yes, I made a serious misstatement. I am sorry for the confusion I caused. I was trying to point out that the Ram on any PC was an OS resource, generally not directly an app resource. A lot of people get confused when we try to talk about Ram requirements. The discussion was getting too deep into the grey area in this thread (for most users) of how Ram, Virtual Memory, Swap file space, and Real Memory are allocated, used, and fit together. I do trust that GC3 will be using the "Available Ram" figure it will get from the OS to determine what size galaxies it can support with how many start systems and planets, among other things. And I have faith some testing will be done to make sure the amount of swapping will be below some standard. All of this should be under the covers.

The basic thing users should need to know about Ram is if he/she has enough Ram to run the game without seriously degrading performance, or knowing that he/she is limited to a galaxy size for lack of enough Ram.

Since this is a rambling thread, may I add another performance concern I have experienced with other games, that of a GPU getting hot and having to slow down its clock. Too often users get confused about what is really happening to them when they use graphics settings that are too high for their GPU. I think it would be of great value if GC3 had a small routine in it that got activated at some interval (perhaps every 5 seconds) that queried the OS for the current temperature of the GPU compared to its Tj Max. If the temperature gets too high warn the user to reduce some of GC3's graphics settings to avoid serious performance loss.

There's no rule saying they can't build to humble specs (64-bit yeah, but not necessarily multi-core .... would be great if it ran on a cheap sub-$300 laptop with maybe 3 or 4 GB of RAM) and yet scale to take advantage of more if a player has more.

Chibiabos ^^^ that is exactly what I am thinking of. 

Lucky, thank you for clarification. The graphix setting thing is a great idea, I use EVGA's Prescision X to monitor my GPU and force my fan to max speed when I game anyway.