Why does Civ5 Have Longer Load Times than Other Games

Aeradom

Chieftain
Joined
Sep 26, 2015
Messages
1
First off, and to be clear, this isn't a thread asking on how to fix my load times. I know an SSD would be better and help the game load quicker than a regular Hard Drive. This is also a reformatted computer, so I'm not going to have issues with the other usual culprits. Plus, load times are about the same both pre and post reformatting so it's doubtful that would help anyways.

What I'm actually more curious though is why Civ5 has the longest startup time of any game I've ever played (that is the time it takes from starting the game to get access to the main menu). I've played dozens of games all with varying levels of complexities and mods installed. But as far as I recall, at least on this current rig, there isn't another game that takes minutes to startup. So I am just curious what makes Civ5 so special. I've heard on one thread that it's all the xmls it has to load or the way their formatted. But I've dealt with a game like Skyrim that I've had over a hundred mods and it takes fraction of the time to get everything going.

So yeah, just curious not looking for help at this point. Thanks in advance for the responses.
 
That is just level of managers and developers who wrote it. Load time probably wasn't priority - so nobody tried to optimize it.
One can try to setup Process Monitor and see exact IO activity if that may be interesting. Since SSD rocks over HDD - I bet it just reads files by random small portions .
 
That's why I started to not like. After a few patches and the cover music fail in multiplayer after crashes, I no longer used it that often anymore.
 
Very poor optimization. People who have tried to play Civ 5 from a RAMDISK have reported very little improvement over SSD. Also, the game artificially caps its own RAM and CPU usage. I personally would much rather see a patch to optimize Civ 5 than move alterations for BE or a Civ 6.
 
Y all this sux... And most irritating for me is 'Configuring game data'. I know my pc is slow but like 10 seconds cause some1 doesnt have, say, 2 wonders? :mad:
U join lobby -> 'Configuring game data', u leave it -> 'Configuring game data'.
 
First off, and to be clear, this isn't a thread asking on how to fix my load times. I know an SSD would be better and help the game load quicker than a regular Hard Drive. This is also a reformatted computer, so I'm not going to have issues with the other usual culprits. Plus, load times are about the same both pre and post reformatting so it's doubtful that would help anyways.

What I'm actually more curious though is why Civ5 has the longest startup time of any game I've ever played (that is the time it takes from starting the game to get access to the main menu). I've played dozens of games all with varying levels of complexities and mods installed. But as far as I recall, at least on this current rig, there isn't another game that takes minutes to startup. So I am just curious what makes Civ5 so special. I've heard on one thread that it's all the xmls it has to load or the way their formatted. But I've dealt with a game like Skyrim that I've had over a hundred mods and it takes fraction of the time to get everything going.

So yeah, just curious not looking for help at this point. Thanks in advance for the responses.

Many files, and the database initialization/modification take a lot of the loading time.

So for those who have installed Civ5 on a SSD, make sure that the game's cache folder in your documents is also on the SSD (that's where the DB is stored), I've just tried because I was curious, the results (to get to the main menu):

cache on my data HDD
44.2 seconds
43.1
43.2

cache on my games SSD
39.5
38.9
39.0
 
More odd, considering that side from airplanes there's no SOD in Civ 5. And even for airplanes you can't have 50 bombers in one city.

Turns in old civs go by instantly with animations turned off on a modern computer. It's too bad that this game isn't faster, otherwise I'd play more of it.
 
From my experience having an SSD doesn't actually speed up load times at all that I've noticed. Ive played civ 5 on two computers, one with and one without an SSD and both of them loaded the game at pretty much the exact same time.
 
It loads once. Skyrim and many other games load many times over the course of a game.
 
It has to do with the ghz. Higher ghz pc or laptop will load civV a lot faster.
 
I like the load time to get all my proper refreshments in order. Like beer and whiskey.
 
I like the load time because it keeps me from restarting when the RNG does not go my way.

I leave the game running all the time because of the load time.
 
I leave the game running all the time because of the load time.

To each his own, but I think this is a horrible decision. Part of this game's bad optimization is that it makes your PC run unnecessarily hot. My PC is made of hand picked components primarily for the purpose of low power consumption, and therefore heat, and therefore noise. Yet I video edit with it, so it's about as strong as you can get. I have most of the settings in game turned down specifically to keep the heat down as much as I can. I never leave the game running when I'm not playing it. Even though the rest of my PC, I have no problem leaving things on or running for convenience's sake.
 
I leave the game running all the time because of the load time.

I used to do this all the time. I have no actual proof, but I'm pretty sure that's what caused the fan on my original video card to burn out.
 
You probably have a closed system.
All components close together producing heat and that heat can't go anywhere will cause sooner or later problems.
It's just a matter of time when a part of your computer will die.
 
My fan burned out too. I used to sleep it and now i get a message before i turn on the computer that says that the fun isnt that good and instead will shut down in 15 seconds if inactivity.
 
I got 32 GB RAM just to make sure Civ will run smoothly, and then that?
what a waste :lol: Civ is a 32-bit application which cannot use more than 2GB (with O/S overhead unless multitasking don't expect more than 4GB RAM useage)

The likely reason the game takes so long to load is that the code is probably poorly structured, especially the decision to access game data via slow poke SQL interpreter, while mostly using only simple table XY queries... and manage the popup event system by pooling slow interpreted lua code :crazyeye:
 
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