Turn times - Myths revealed

Buttercup

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This is a thread for people who haven't played any other Civilisation game other than Civilisation 5.

Please be aware that the DRAAAAAAAAGGGing out of turn times late in the game has always been a feature of the Civilisation series, even if you turn off AI animations (which can help a bit).

I remember clearly this being a massive pain in Civ 2 and, though improved for Civ 3 (though I am playing it on a modern PC rather than a 10 year old one) I still find it a right nail in the coffin of Modern Era gameplay enjoyment on Huge maps.

It's just one of those things about the Civilisation series and it's not about graphics for those of you who are used to daily drive to upgrade graphic every 2 days, it's because every turn the game has to calculate and animate every action/event in the game, which, by the modern era on a Huge map, is a completely different kettle of fish to the early Settler phase.

I've only ever touched on Civ 1 and Civ 4 and not played either into the Modern Era on a Huge map so cannot comment about whether these were the same.

But, basically, to conclude, complaining about long turn times in the Civilisation series is a time-worn path and one that should not make any difference when debating the merits of the different episodes in the series.

Admittedly, it would be nice if each new sequel 'improved' on this, but if this is at the cost of less calculations taking place then that's a price the Civ series can well do without.

For me it's actually comforting to think that the 'Dumbed down' version of the game is still immense enough to need vast amounts of calculating/animating time.
 
This is a thread for people who haven't played any other Civilisation game other than Civilisation 5.

Please be aware that the DRAAAAAAAAGGGing out of turn times late in the game has always been a feature of the Civilisation series, even if you turn off AI animations (which can help a bit).

I remember clearly this being a massive pain in Civ 2 and, though improved for Civ 3 (though I am playing it on a modern PC rather than a 10 year old one) I still find it a right nail in the coffin of Modern Era gameplay enjoyment on Huge maps.

It's just one of those things about the Civilisation series and it's not about graphics for those of you who are used to daily drive to upgrade graphic every 2 days, it's because every turn the game has to calculate and animate every action/event in the game, which, by the modern era on a Huge map, is a completely different kettle of fish to the early Settler phase.

I've only ever touched on Civ 1 and Civ 4 and not played either into the Modern Era on a Huge map so cannot comment about whether these were the same.

But, basically, to conclude, complaining about long turn times in the Civilisation series is a time-worn path and one that should not make any difference when debating the merits of the different episodes in the series.

Admittedly, it would be nice if each new sequel 'improved' on this, but if this is at the cost of less calculations taking place then that's a price the Civ series can well do without.

For me it's actually comforting to think that the 'Dumbed down' version of the game is still immense enough to need vast amounts of calculating/animating time.

Umm, you're trivialising a legitimate technical issue with the latest patch, the the point of being patronising.

Many gamers, myself included, have played the series since the initial game, so we're familiar with the franchise, thanks very much. Many of us, especially those of us who heavily utilised the mods made by the community are also intimately familiar with the Memory Allocation Failure inherent to Civ 4 due to the game engine's design.

And this turn time issue created by the latest patch is not the same thing. Not even close. Dennis Shirk himself has indicated as much. And as an ITSM practitioner, I know for a fact what can happen to an IT system or service when you change it, and this patch did indeed make significant changes.

Changes that I'm seeing the effect of in turn times after 350 turns which approach nearly 4-5 minutes on a Quad Core i970 running 12Gb of 1333 speed RAM and a GTX460 EE Superclocked video card, a system which was processing turns pretty damned fast prior to the patch thanks very much.

Don't tell me that cause and effect here are myth; It's insulting. I'd use more colourful language to express what I think of your "mythbusting", but you're not worth the infraction.
 
I wasn't referencing the latest patch.

OMG, has the patch made the game WORSE?

Whoops...
 
Umm, you're trivialising a legitimate technical issue with the latest patch, the the point of being patronising.

Many gamers, myself included, have played the series since the initial game, so we're familiar with the franchise, thanks very much. Many of us, especially those of us who heavily utilised the mods made by the community are also intimately familiar with the Memory Allocation Failure inherent to Civ 4 due to the game engine's design.

And this turn time issue created by the latest patch is not the same thing. Not even close. Dennis Shirk himself has indicated as much. And as an ITSM practitioner, I know for a fact what can happen to an IT system or service when you change it, and this patch did indeed make significant changes.

Changes that I'm seeing the effect of in turn times after 350 turns which approach nearly 4-5 minutes on a Quad Core i970 running 12Gb of 1333 speed RAM and a GTX460 EE Superclocked video card, a system which was processing turns pretty damned fast prior to the patch thanks very much.

Don't tell me that cause and effect here are myth; It's insulting. I'd use more colourful language to express what I think of your "mythbusting", but you're not worth the infraction.

I don't think the topic starter meant it that way...just more of a general summary on why the game slows down in the later stages :)
OT: as someone who started with Civ5 and therefore the intended audience for the original post, I was in fact wondering if previous versions slowed down like Civ5 does.
 
I don't think the topic starter meant it that way...just more of a general summary on why the game slows down in the later stages :)
OT: as someone who started with Civ5 and therefore the intended audience for the original post, I was in fact wondering if previous versions slowed down like Civ5 does.

what about turn times in gods and kings. Have they improved?
 
I used to play Civ3 on my crappy (for games) Mac laptop probably running on the Rosetta emulator and the turn times were ridiculously long. Also in Civ3 you typically had a billion cities late game. So it was a labour of love indeed.
 
CIV still crashes on my every now and then, and by the end sometimes turns take up to 10 seconds on my laptop from teh future.

What I am trying to say is, if turn times were breaking the game for me, I wouldn't have played any Civ game after 2.
 
Yh no, it's definitely not a "myth". The game is nearly unplayable since the damned patch of about a week ago. Even in the first 30 turns it's being a right bastard to me. It used to be pretty much instantaneous turns prepatch in the first 30 turns or so, whereas now it's regularly taking half a minute and taking a minimum of 15ish seconds. This "patch" is just a joke, it's made the game worse not better.
 
The game runs pretty fine for me. I think I maybe more tolerant than others though.

I do also usually play only on standard maps with the graphics set to default but I'm also running on a PC with half the specs of what the guy mentioned above. Still, I don't think I've seen the wait time for a turn over 2 minutes "if" that. Since the path I thought I saw a improvement. The game doesn't lock up more and you can open up the various menus and browse the demographics or diplomatic overview as you wait instead of staring a locked up screen.
 
I wasn't referencing the latest patch.

OMG, has the patch made the game WORSE?

Whoops...

Yep, unfortunately so. ;) Your comments in a general context I think are fair enough, Civ 4 suffered some pretty harsh issues with MAF until BtS came along and optimised things (which in turn were somewhat nullified by the extra content from some of those awesome fun but PC-killing mods I was talking about)

But yeah, you're not witnessing run of the mill bawwing here. :D If you can avoid the patch, suggest you do so. ;)

Sorry if I sounded snarky - I don't get frustrated when I lose at something, I get frustrated when my stuff starts breaking, and at the time I posted I'd just finished rebooting my machine after whatever bug was introduced post-patch caused a massive memory leak and proceeded to butt-shagged my rig without using lube (and never returned it's calls). The resultant hard reset also killed my 3rd attempt at downloading updated video drivers. :(

Have rolled back some of the changes I made to my own config to see if that helps.



Feels Bad Man.
 
Have had zero issues post-patch beyond the changing of the DLCs on saved games. The game seems faster and smoother. Turn times in industrial are taking no more than 15 seconds on epic, large, 8 civs, 16 CS.
 
No probs Uncle Aston, I'm prone to similar forum confusions myself, as are most people! I think you post has still added a great deal to the thread in terms of information :)
 
Yh no, it's definitely not a "myth". The game is nearly unplayable since the damned patch of about a week ago. Even in the first 30 turns it's being a right bastard to me. It used to be pretty much instantaneous turns prepatch in the first 30 turns or so, whereas now it's regularly taking half a minute and taking a minimum of 15ish seconds. This "patch" is just a joke, it's made the game worse not better.

Please stop over generalizing. The Patch made my machine a little slower early game (like 2-3 seconds) and significantly faster later game. The patch is not a "joke" for most people. It's definitely something to do with how civ works with your specific hardware.
 
I dont know what it is with my system, but even the start of the game, the turn timer takes seconds to change on a huge map even pre patch. 18 civs on a huge map, the first game turn takes about 30 seconds, i gave up on that game quick because as an avid civ player i know that turns take increasingly longer as the game goes on. Ill try it again when I get G&K, I miss my huge worlds of all the civs playing at once :)
 
While I agree performance always drops as you get into later eras, the difference in Civ V is that the turns are always slow.

In Civ IV, I would press end turn, and I would be good to go in 2 seconds. In Civ V it often takes 5-10. So by late game if Civ Iv is going 5-10, but Civ V is doing 20 seconds, its a much bigger problem.

That said, I actually have found gods and kings to be a little quicker for me.
 
But, basically, to conclude, complaining about long turn times in the Civilisation series is a time-worn path and one that should not make any difference when debating the merits of the different episodes in the series.

When civ V came out it was clocked. It's slower than other iterations of the game. But you are correct to point out that utterly awful coding is not new to civ V.

Admittedly, it would be nice if each new sequel 'improved' on this, but if this is at the cost of less calculations taking place then that's a price the Civ series can well do without.

Only if the calculations are necessary. Animating things off-screen, not caching anything, and having forced delays in places are not acceptable decisions. After telling one unit to move, you often have to wait multiple seconds to move the next unit on the same turn. WHY? Because failaxis.

For me it's actually comforting to think that the 'Dumbed down' version of the game is still immense enough to need vast amounts of calculating/animating time.

Just because it's using up time doesn't mean it's using up time doing something useful. Enough with the benefit of the doubt for the 143rd time jokes.

Many gamers, myself included, have played the series since the initial game, so we're familiar with the franchise, thanks very much. Many of us, especially those of us who heavily utilised the mods made by the community are also intimately familiar with the Memory Allocation Failure inherent to Civ 4 due to the game engine's design.

+1

lease don't overreact.
There's a bug in the latest patch, which lead to serious performance breakdowns for a lot of people. Not for all, probably not for the most, but for many, and it was really that bad.

IMO that "bug" has existed since before vanilla release. They absolutely could have made things much more tolerable but there was no effort.

If across a game, the turn time averages 20 seconds (faster early, much slower later) and you play a 300 turn game, well then congratulations. You spent over an hour and a half "playing" where you were in fact just staring at the screen. That time could have been better spent watching paint dry, or mashing alt-tab between 2 windows, or doing front flips in the living room.

This of course does not count the slow GUI DURING turns. On a players OWN turn, what the ************** is wrong with firaxis that a player's limiting factor isn't his own inputs...WITH ANIMATIONS OFF? Civ is the only franchise I've played where I can out-order the interface because it responds that slowly. I'm not a superhuman; the coding just sucks that hard. What calculation is being done that I can't move a unit immediately after selecting it? That I can't select my next unit immediately after moving one? It's a disgrace.

I'm all for supporting each and every person who finds it intolerable instead of just dealing with it and letting failaxis continue the trend. Unless I hear and see video evidence that it's been fixed, I'm not buying another civ product, ever...and that's coming from someone who's spent many, many hours with civ.

I'm not even talking about this new patch nonsense, because I haven't played the game in a long time and will not play it again until it's fixed...which is increasingly appearing to be never.
 
I think part of my lack of caring about turn times in Civ5 comes from the fact that when I first got Civ4 I played it on a really bad computer (for like the first year) and turns times in the late game would commonly take up to half an hour. One minute in the late minute in the late game in Civ5 is peanuts compared to that. This does not mean that the turn times are any better or worse than in previous iterations, it just means that it depends on your experience and your tolerance for such issues.

IMO that "bug" has existed since before vanilla release.

Well, no, it's a quite specific bug that's being referred to that was introduced in the patch that only impacts some people. Turn time issues may have existed, but that's not what's being referred to when talking about the bug.
 
Well, ok. I've confirmed the game still doesn't work for people who play quickly. I'll crawl back into my hole until the next time I get a little hope the game has been fixed :).
 
I think part of my lack of caring about turn times in Civ5 comes from the fact that when I first got Civ4 I played it on a really bad computer (for like the first year) and turns times in the late game would commonly take up to half an hour.

when I first got Civ4 I played it on a really bad computer (for like the first year) and turns times in the late game would commonly take up to half an hour.

I played it on a really bad computer (for like the first year) and turns times in the late game would commonly take up to half an hour.


turns times in the late game would commonly take up to half an hour.

take up to half an hour.



I don't know if I could play with 30 min ibt turns. You must be one of the most patient people on this planet.
 
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