Will Civ V bog down less at end

OK, maybe you missed the point. By punishing rapid & thoughtless expansionism in the late-game, Maintenance is a means of curing bogging down in the end-game. Now, if the need to conquer the entire world was entirely eliminated from the victory conditions (in favor of merely dominating the other players) then the problem would be entirely solved. For my part, I never ran into major issues with Maintenance in the late game, because I almost always pursued a diplomatic, space race or cultural victory.

Aussie.

Some people like to conquer the world and the maintenance negative feedback loop directly inhibits that by bogging you down.

So no, maintenance does not cure bogging down, it "cures" conquest victories by bogging them down.

I will never be a fan of negative feedback loops. Quite simply put, they punish success with tedium and frustration. If my opponents are so weak that they simply cannot withstand the juggernaut that is my army sweeping across the globe and wiping them out, why must the game mechanics themselves fight so hard to delay the inevitable?

r_rolo1 said:

Your point 1) ( in spite of not being wrong ) assumes no method of rushing a unit, especially one that treats units in a far better light than buildings ( but not only ) , like the Civ IV drafting, to be fully appliable. as every civ game so far from quite a while had some kind of rushing feature, that is a little shaky ground....

.Your point 2), as others pointed to me in other discussions ( and not in my help ), is shaky at best
[...]
About the map size.... not so sure on the 3D being the sole reason to make maps smaller ( or even being a reason at all ... IMHO the real reason for the map sizes as they are has much more to do with the strain produced by the number of units in play compared with a decent computer of the times Civ Iv got out than anything else ). [...]
Well about firaxis thinking that moving 20-30 units line is fun or not .... well, they definitely thinked that a SoD aproach to the game was unfun and tried to get rid of it

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good point about unit rushing. i forgot about that.

how do you imagine units' numbers strain the computer?
considering that most of the units are either fortified(on sentry, healing, e.g. passive) or moving as part of a SoD.
however the number of units was an issue in civ2 where each ai would move all active units all their movement points every turn

as to maintaining 20-30 tile fronts:
by maintaining i not only mean advancing or retreating in some fashion, that should not break units' relative positions, but replacing damaged units with reinforcements, plugging holes with reserves, etc. imho front maintenance is tedious, annoying, unfun, and timeconsuming if there will be the "everything-does-not-fit-on-one-screen" issue (may i say clickfest? )

chongli said:

Curing it? I would personally attribute maintenance to be one of the main causes of "bogging down" during the mop-up phase. Civ4 featured a negative feedback cycle that progressively crippled your economy the bigger you got, slowing the game to a crawl.

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I would personally attribute inflation to be one of the main causes of "bogging down" during the end game.
if city maintenance beats the player down before cottages' maturity and banks, then inflation beats the player down in late industrial/modern age.

hmm... that may be the cause why cottages mature so long, so that the player could not [over]expand before inflation kicks in.

i would utterly hate it if inflation will be in civ5

What is inflation? When city maintenance increases gradually?

Gamemaster77 said:

What is inflation? When city maintenance increases gradually?

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no

it is

Mesodius said:

What I hope is that the game graphics don't hog so many resources that you have to wait several minutes for the AI to take their turn unless you just bought your computer 10 minutes ago.

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That is not the graphics engine hogging up resources, but the AI routines hogging up resources. Turndown the graphics settings, for example, does not significantly imporve turn times.

@Hail

Units in Civ IV need far more processing power than units in previous civ versions. For a example, a unit in Civ III has the str level, the hitpoints bar ( bigger or smaller regarding xp level ), the fortifying level ( IIRC ) and in C3C intel about if the unit already created a army or not, while a unit in Civ IV has the name , the str level, the xp , the promotions ( the whole lot of them if needed ) and the fortify level. This means that unit in Civ IV has probaby one or two orders of magnitude more intel to be handled per unit than a civ III one.

But are right in a point. After posting that, I made some digging and discovered that a lot of the processor strain in big maps in Civ IV comes from a unsuspecting source: trade routes assignement and calc of trade groups. I also was reminded that vanilla Civ IV had a lot more python calls from the DLL than BtS , another factor that dragged the performance of big maps down in those days ( not that BtS was much optimized in it self... otherwise there would be no room for making a optimizing mod ( like CAR ) that could increase performance up to 25% ) ... but anyway, the number of units normally is a small factor as far as IBT is concerned ( the human turn is a little bit diferent, especially because a lot of players aren't very good in handling waypoints and the other time cut tools that come with the game )

Well, at least the modern age will be very fun warfarewise thanks to the new battlesystem. Perfect for modern wars. I look forward to it indeed.

Thanks Fuerza. I don't really know how they can fix this problem. Seems this has been an issue in all the Civ games to some degree. I mean if u want u can always turn off all the battle animations, have quick results, etc, to make it go faster. Part of the problem was my own lazyness at the end of games. If I put more of my units on go to, and did other auto stuff in the game it woudln't be as bad.
It really wasn't soo much that there were too many units, I thnk the thing that bothered me the most was how long it took to conquer cities often in late game. The SoD problem is definitely there, but I don't know if I would eliminate or reduce stacks to fix the problem. I guess what I might like to see would be a steeper ramping up of power of units later in the ages. It just seemed that many times it was obvious a game was over (u had super bombers, the best tanks, etc (a bunch of techs better in army than ur opponent), yet your opponent could seemingly hold off for a long time. If those later units were more devastating i think that would help a good bit. Maybe make the later techs take even longer to get, but if u did get them they would just devastate the enemy. Like the nukes, u can bash a city many many times with a nuke and it is still there, that doesn't seem quite right. Well enuf of my rambling for now. ANy thoughts u all have on this im interested to hear about.

r_rolo1 said:

Units in Civ IV need far more processing power than units in previous civ versions. For a example, a unit in Civ III has the str level, the hitpoints bar ( bigger or smaller regarding xp level ), the fortifying level ( IIRC ) and in C3C intel about if the unit already created a army or not, while a unit in Civ IV has the name , the str level, the xp , the promotions ( the whole lot of them if needed ) and the fortify level. This means that unit in Civ IV has probaby one or two orders of magnitude more intel to be handled per unit than a civ III one.

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a unit can have as many attributes as needed. any processing power will be spent only on attributes that require dynamic adjusting. e.g. updating movement points during end/start turn phase and/or increasing for any units in a healing state and/or increasing fortification bonus for any units in a fortifying state.

Luckystrike77 said:

Well, at least the modern age will be very fun warfarewise thanks to the new battlesystem. Perfect for modern wars. I look forward to it indeed.

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civ5 is an epic empire-building game! starting from 1914 A.D. with one settler, the player will discover city-states, resource limits, and triremes firing 5-6 hexes away! build cities, units, GPs, fronts in an attempt to conquer the world! truly marvelous, exceptionally beautiful, micromanagement heaven coming out this Fall!

fuerza said:

As you may recall, tons and TONS of people complained about random game crashes as you progressed through the gameplay in Civ IV (especially late game play when you had the map full of stuff and many civs battling it out), and as you also may recall 2k games did absolutely nothing about it.

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There was no need to. If people's games were crashing at that point, it was because their computer just wasn't good enough to run it at that point. All they had to do was play on smaller maps and their games would never have crashed. There was nothing to fix.

r_rolo1 said:

I don't think I ever seen a Civ IV game where there were more units than tiles in the map, so that is not a valid argument IMHO

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I think it's quite possible in some mods. But I also disagree with your other conclusion anyway - I think map sizes/unit counts will end up smaller in Civ5. This won't significantly change turn times on its own though.

I think map sizes will actually be larger. I'm just guessing, but it seems civ5 might be going to a more "zoomed in" scale, given things like archer bombard, city footprints being extended to a 3-tile radius and so forth.

It seems to be confirmed that unit count, however, will drop drastically. Not because of 1upt but because it was specifically mentioned that game mechanics like city support, and especially a new resource model, will cap unit counts at a much lower level.

If trade routes and so on are the biggest cause of slowdown in the late game, then I suspect it will continue to be a problem, especially with larger maps. I don't quite see this though - how are trade routes in civ4 any different than trade routes in civ2 or civ3? The mechanics behind them do not seem to be terribly different.

*Shakes the Magic Eight Ball*

Reply hazy, try again later.

*Shakes again*

Outlook not so good.

Hail said:

a unit can have as many attributes as needed. any processing power will be spent only on attributes that require dynamic adjusting. e.g. updating movement points during end/start turn phase and/or increasing for any units in a healing state and/or increasing fortification bonus for any units in a fortifying state.

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Any paramether that can be changed might need dynamic adjusting as long as you give the modders acess to it That is just a question of what you want to put in the IBT to change. I can make a civ IV mod without going to the unreleased part of the code ( the exe file ) that gives XP on a turn basis or that changes the name of the unit based on antiquity. So the system has to be ready to acept those changes , even if the stock game does not use them. Civ III unit caractheristics schema is buried on unreleased code, so you should not be able to change that if you don't do something less than legal ... this means that the coders could do the code based on the assumption that the things that need to be adjusted per unit have a finite and well known limit. That is a huge diference in terms of IBT optimization ...

@Earthling

If you notice, I have not made my conclusion about Civ V map sizes out of the one unit per tile rule or anything like that. My point in this thread was to say that the known features of civ V at the moment were ( and AFAIK are ) not enough by themselfes to make the game lag less, especially the constraint to the number of units per tile

I really hated inflation. There should never be a major cost that:
a) Is fairly hidden and opaque (there is only *one* entry for it in the entire game)
b) Is completely out of control of the player.

Its a bad way to try to "balance" the lategame.

I agree, inflation sucks

PS simply goes up over time, that is it no special formula

I was going to say ( as Rolo1 has already alluded ) that late game lags & crashes in CIV IV are in large part due to calculating trade routes ( bigger maps usually mean more cities ), python checks, and "memory leaks ". We don't know if or how such things are being addressed. Perhaps by utilizing additional cores?

actually memory leaks has to do with RAM

Well, with no memory allocation, memory leaks should be far less frequent ( ). But I wonder how the more GPU intensive aproach ( atleast is what i conclude from the words of Shaefer here ) will bode with computers with crappy graphical cards ( aka laptops ) ...