turn times on giant map

I am currently playing of the giant-play the world map, 22 civs, and 20 city states and am just coming into the industrial era. China has the largest army, and at the moment (with china a war) my turns are taking over four minutes, with china using a good 2 and a half of these.

My computer is a quad core 3.6GHz processor, and my question is, is this normal?

I realize that such a big map is a drain on the CPU speed, but 4+ minute at the mid point of the game? I am horrified to see what the end will be like. I am already at the point of being unable to play, and am just wondering if people do release maps this large, is anyone actually able to play them to completion?

Oh, and I am using the latest patch, with BNW.

Cheers

It is a known problem with Civ. Here are some things you can try to speed it up.
Make sure you have all animation set to quick.
Don't keep units (especially workers) in auto explore/construct.
Lower graphics and specifically ones that deal with CPU.
Before you end turn change the view to strategic view.
And finally, just use smaller maps which no one likes to hear, but it does work

While I appreciate the giant maps, huge seems to be large enough and the turn times aren't bad for me.

Also out of curiosity, what is your GPU, HD space, and RAM for your computer? Your CPU is plenty high enough (Civ is just a hog) but it is possible those others could be slowing you down although I imagine if you have a CPU like that your other components are also pretty high

Thanks for the reply.


1 tera hard disc, 2 gig graphics card (7800 hd series radon), 8 gig of ram. I just tried the fast move option, and the 4min 20 sec (timed it) went down to 2 minutes 10 sec. Why on earth would fast movement be like this? I mean, surely if you cannot see what's going on (fow) then all of these movements should be fast. Its almost like when I have my turn, switch off fast, then for the ai, switch on fast, which really it should be anyway?? Which graphic option deal with the CPU, because I play with Direct x 11, shadow low, but everything else at max (sure does look pretty)

Damn Civ. I thought that after all the problems that civ 4 had with large mods, large map and only one core usability, with civ 5 they might have got this right.

Essentially quick movement/combat takes the processing time out for determining animations, or something like that. When you have hundreds of these going on late game this can slow things down. I don't remember which graphics specifically deal with cpu but maybe someone else around here does. You could go ahead and turn everything down a level and see how much of a difference it makes.

zoommooz11 said:

Thanks for the reply.


1 tera hard disc, 2 gig graphics card (7800 hd series radon), 8 gig of ram. I just tried the fast move option, and the 4min 20 sec (timed it) went down to 2 minutes 10 sec. Why on earth would fast movement be like this? I mean, surely if you cannot see what's going on (fow) then all of these movements should be fast. Its almost like when I have my turn, switch off fast, then for the ai, switch on fast, which really it should be anyway?? Which graphic option deal with the CPU, because I play with Direct x 11, shadow low, but everything else at max (sure does look pretty)

Damn Civ. I thought that after all the problems that civ 4 had with large mods, large map and only one core usability, with civ 5 they might have got this right.

Click to expand...

An SSD drive would run a lot better than a 1TB drive. You don't have enough memory for a RAM that fits Civ5.

Maybe you can post a save file. I can see what my i7-930 will do. I have a Raid0 SSD setup and a 10gb ram disk I could test on

Thanks for the replies, but just ticking the fast movement box has made an enormous difference. If there is not a major fight going on, on the above mention giant map, late into the modern era, my turn times have gone from 4 minutes down to 20 seconds. Because the improvement is SO large, I think for new players this should be shouted out a little louder somewhere. Regardless, the game has become a real joy again.

Much, much appreciated.

I always thought it was my machine that is the issue until i read some of the threads

What i dont understand is, if so many people cant play giant maps, why are so many custom maps giant size

I would kill for a standard sized european map

Just an update.

My game is now late atomic era, and I was happily playing along with 40-60 second turn times. Suddenly, the American turns are taking around 10 minutes?? Now, though they are a large civ, there are quite a few large civs, and all of the other civ combined turns are still only taking about 1 minute. Every few turns the American go back to normal, with a 5 second turn, but then straight back to the ten minutes the turn after.

They are the most technically advanced nation, but it just seems strange that one particular civ is taking so long the process. (This is with the quick movement on, and they are not even at war with anyone) It almost seems like there is some type of bug/memory leak at work here.

It gets bad once those bombers show up if you don't have animations off. You're looking at 30-35 minutes waiting on the computer to finish up their turns.

troublmaker said:

It gets bad once those bombers show up if you don't have animations off. You're looking at 30-35 minutes waiting on the computer to finish up their turns.

Click to expand...

That could be it, as I noticed they have more then 30 odd bombers. Is there anyway to turn animation off for combat outside there players field of view (where it does not matter) and only have combat animated where you can actually see it??

Edit: And 30 minute turn times?? Did the developers even play their game? I'm not usually too disparaging of civ, as the entire franchise has to be the best ever (IMHO) but 30 minutes is a absolute, never to play again disgrace.

zoommooz11 said:

That could be it, as I noticed they have more then 30 odd bombers. Is there anyway to turn animation off for combat outside there players field of view (where it does not matter) and only have combat animated where you can actually see it??

Edit: And 30 minute turn times?? Did the developers even play their game? I'm not usually too disparaging of civ, as the entire franchise has to be the best ever (IMHO) but 30 minutes is a absolute, never to play again disgrace.

Click to expand...

And this is the reason I never play on anything bigger than Standard size. The game becomes rather tedious and I often ended up wipping out my cell phone to play mini-games while waiting for my actual game to let me play. Sad...

there's a couple things you might not be aware of. in task manager you can check on the game if it is actually using 4 processors or not. go into task manager and you can do this individually by game. click Processes tab and right click the game exe. click 'Set Affinity'. it will bring up a window with check boxes for each processor (0, 1, 2, 3, 4 if you have 4 processors). Click all of them if they arent selected. You can also do this for steam.exe. It only helps a little with some processing but it does help.

Also, google 'RAMdisk'. it is software that lets you use a portion of your unused RAM as a hard disk. If you have 8gb of RAM you will usually be able to allot up to 2gb of it for faster hard drive transfers. as much of a hog that Civ5 is it still doesnt use all of the 8gb RAM you have. there is a max 4gb freeware you can use to do this. it is from a company that was bought by AMD but it doesnt require you to have AMD brand parts. if you choose to educate yourself on it by reading forums be sure to check the date of the forums because info pre-2012 will usually reflect problems RAMdisk had before it was really improved since then. there are some youtube tutorials on it too.

but ultimately, even the highest rigs gamers use are still slow on Giant maps with max civs/CSs in the information era. these settings are for people with infinite amounts of patience and/or gluttons for punishment. if you try Giant map on Marathon or Epic just go ahead and allot many sessions and possibly weeks of time to finish one game. that or take some vacation/sick days and wear an adult diaper, haha.

Thanks for the replies guys. Will try the ramdisk thing.

What's frustrating I guess is that the civ 4 forum is filled with people playing large mods on large maps (or trying to ) and I would have thought that the civ designers would have been acutely aware that consumers hoped for a vast improvement in this area.

I am playing Giant Earth Map and I have a problem.I have conquered almost whole earth and I have problem when I attack city with unit,it takes more than 1 minute to attack start,also time between turns is huge.I am playing on high settings.My computer is:CPU LGA1155 Intel® Core™ i7-3770K, 3.50GHz;Gigabyte
VGA GeForce GTX760 Gigabyte OC 2GB/DDR5,/DVI/HDMI/DP/256bit;Kingston DIMM DDR3 16GB 1600MHz Kingston CL11;Kingston
SSD SATA3 120GB Kingston V300, 450/450MB/s.What is the PROBLEM???