Help Me Buy A Civ Tablet

If you can charge from USB you can augment your battery life with an external charger. You can find a 10,000Ma or 12,000Ma external battery on eBay or amazon fairly inexpensively. They are a must have accessory if you plan to game off the grid, whether Civ or any other game.

You might want to have it connected the whole time because a power hungry game can actually drain your tablet battery faster than an external battery can recharge it, but it will still give you a LOT more time.

Good for watching movies too.

joncnunn said:

My above post deals with Civ V detecting your offline and it's prompt to go to it.

Steam also has an offline mode. Which if upon booting up it doesn't find the server in about 30 seconds or so it will time out and ask if you want to start in offline mode.

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Relying on the default error-recovery behavior seems worrisome. Again, I have not looked for the setting specifically, since I only ever play on a desktop. Civ5 and Steam are the only programs that crash on my iMac, so I am reluctant to try and take them on the road.

Xiao Xiong said:

You might want to have it connected the whole time...

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I scold my kids when they play with their DS plugged in! They are not careful, and have broken the cables (or even the power connection on the DS). But mostly it means they are playing too much!

I find it troubling that people's usage habits are such that the tables need to be plugged in while being used. Kind of defeats the whole of the tablet form factor. Mostly I think it is the engineers/designers failing. Is this a phenomenon only with the low-end tablets, or do iPad owners play on the couch or in bed with the iPad plugged in?

beetle said:

Relying on the default error-recovery behavior seems worrisome. Again, I have not looked for the setting specifically, since I only ever play on a desktop. Civ5 and Steam are the only programs that crash on my iMac, so I am reluctant to try and take them on the road.

I find it troubling that people's usage habits are such that the tables need to be plugged in while being used. Kind of defeats the whole of the tablet form factor. Mostly I think it is the engineers/designers failing. Is this a phenomenon only with the low-end tablets, or do iPad owners play on the couch or in bed with the iPad plugged in?

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The Steam menu also supports "manually" going offline if you really want to.

When a tablet is used as a book, it will last a lot longer than trying to play a game. It's always going to take a lot more power to play a memory & graphic intensive game and note that Civ V (and other windows games) are much more intensive than games designed for tablets.
If they wanted to they could have them come with bigger batteries, but that would increase the costs above the point that people are willing to pay for them.
(Tablets started life as a CHEAPER alternative to ultra light notebooks)

I just don't think this game is suited to a tablet. For one thing, the ergonomics are not suited to a 10/11 inch max touchscreen - it's designed to be played on a 22 inch or larger monitor. The icons are too small, but also a lot of the wow factor comes from the fabulous level of detail this allows.

As regards the computing horsepower/battery life side of the equation, the code is simply far too inefficient. If a desktop Ivy Bridge I5 processor can be maxed out by this game with a power budget of 90 watts, i'm not sure a tablet chip with a 5 watt budget is ever going to run this well. 5 watts x 5 hours = 25 watts, which is about 2/3 of the capacity of the internal battery - but you 'll be needing the rest for the screen. True, tech has moved on, we now use the next gen Haswell processors with better performance per watt, but with AI code this spendthrift, i can never see it running on a tablet!

b7fanatix said:

i can never see it running on a tablet!

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Remember that Civ V Vanilla first came out several years ago. A middle of the road PC bought the same day Civ V Vanilla came out now has less power than a tablet bought today.
(In case of a Windows 8 tablet, by default that only applies if it's plugged in because the default power management for Windows 8 to save battery life reduces the power. It can be overridden though but that just means you have less time until the battery runs out.)

In fact I looked up the processor specs of my Samsung Phone and it's processing power actually exceeds that of the computer I had when Civ V first came out.