I am a BricsCAD user and just purchased Carlson Civil hoping that it would run like BricsCAD V9.
Alas the IntelliCAD 6.6.17.16 build that Carlson is running on is very slow and buggy.
I can open my 7 MB DWG in BricsCAD and move around, turn layers on and off etc quickly in real time.
I open the same file in Carlson Civil and have to sit there watching one of the CPUs on my Dell Quad machine at 100% for a minute or two between each operation. Then sooner or later IntelliCAD stops responding and I am back where I started.
This is just not viable for large complex files. It probably works OK with small data sets - but I have an 11 mile long corridor with lots of surface data which is really not that unusual for civil design.
I know many people are waiting for ICAD 7 to be the panacea for ICAD speed and bug problems, but the release of 7 has been delayed several times and BricsCAD realized about 2 years ago that unless they forged ahead and implemented their own enhancements to the ICAD database architecture - they would be stuck with a slow buggy product that was very difficult to improve and support.
Now BricsCAD is the leader in Intellicad based software and is focused on providing a reliable platform that makes it practical for software developers like Carlson to port over software designed to run on AutoCAD.
There is a meeting for developers coming up in May see www.bricsys.com/devmeeting. I suggest that someone from Carlson check it out otherwise the Intellicad based version of Carlson Civil is probably going to languish waiting for ICAD 7 to be released and then for a year or so of the inevitable bug-fix cycles for a major new software rewrite and release.
IMHO BricsCAD is already a year or so ahead of ICAD 7 and Carlson would be wise to seriously consider going with BricsCAD ASAP.
Cheers
John