Speed Civ 5 Up Between Turns?

I have an i7 860 oc @ 3.80 and just turned ht off and in my settings.ini file turned the number of threads from 8 to 4, and I think it's sped it up some. Or I could just think it did! I'm going to experiment some more, but I do know ht wasn't helping at all after watching the resource monitor.

Abegweit said:

Agreed. This is all about moving units. Relaxing the 1UPT rule is, IMO, the only solution to this.

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Nooooooo!!! You have a sports car here. It should easily take you at 100 miles per hour. But it's not doing. It's overtaken by cyclists and it's barely able to climb up the ramp to your garage. So what's the solution you're suggesting: flatten all the hills and park on the street? Ban cyclists from humiliating you? These are not even sensible workarounds.

The engine needs a complete overhaul. It was built to allow any Tom, Dick or Harry with a spanner to open it up and tinker with it. Which is crazy. Install a properly designed engine and give the mechanics proper tools to work on it. And then watch it fly.

Personally, I would welcome them slowing down the game in between turns if it meant a smarter AI.

Otherwise, it's pretty speedy to acceptable on my rig.

stormerne said:

Nooooooo!!! You have a sports car here. It should easily take you at 100 miles per hour. But it's not doing. It's overtaken by cyclists and it's barely able to climb up the ramp to your garage. So what's the solution you're suggesting: flatten all the hills and park on the street? Ban cyclists from humiliating you? These are not even sensible workarounds.

The engine needs a complete overhaul. It was built to allow any Tom, Dick or Harry with a spanner to open it up and tinker with it. Which is crazy. Install a properly designed engine and give the mechanics proper tools to work on it. And then watch it fly.

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What sports car are you talking about? A modern CPU is four Toyotas.

30-60 seconds waiting time! I wish! Mine is like 3-4 minutes in between turns! I personally find it pointless to play Civ5 without a full size map including all civs and City States though. Otherwise it starts turning into a free for all like Riseof Nations. I like to simulate the world.

Do the words "thread necro" mean anything to you? If turn times are 3 or 4 minutes you need to:

Get a better computer or
play in strategic view or
turn down the settings or
play on smaller maps

I would be highly suspicious about your CPU Overclock if you're getting such long times between turns.

My computer is decidedly lower spec (though still very modern) than some of these people with i7's and I have no trouble with turn time. I get grumpy when turns take 8 seconds. I play on Standard size maps, but have played on Large maps and didn't see noticeable slow down.

I build my own systems, so I don't have bottlenecks, so maybe that's it. But I think the real problem is unstable CPU's and possibly unstable RAM.

My advice is bring your computer back to spec and see if it helps. People often don't run proper diagnostics when overclocking, or if they do, they don't run them long enough. I'm not saying it's the problem, but it's where I'd start looking.

Oh, and I use "Quick Combat" because turns take long if you're watching units fight. But that's an animation issue and not a performance one.

Misterboy...

"I build my own systems, so I don't have bottlenecks, so maybe that's it. But I think the real problem is unstable CPU's and possibly unstable RAM."

How does one remove bottlenecks from home built computers? Give us some examples.

-The largest bottleneck of nearly every computer on the market today is the HDD. While standard hard drives are quickly being phased out by SSDs it is impossible to remove every bottleneck from a computer. Hence your statement is false. One computer component will always be slower than some other component.

-If you've spent more than 10 minutes browsing through forums you would find that just about every single player absolutely hates and I mean hates the slow speed of the game. Doubt this? Go to google... type in: "Civilization 5 is "

The top 4 suggested searches are:

Civilization 5 is boring
Civilization 5 is hard
Civilization 5 is bad
Civilization 5 is slow

Something that doesn't add to my argument, but is amusing is to go to google and type in "Facebook is "

It suggests
Facebook is down
Facebook is slow
Facebook is evil
Facebook is like jail

Come to think of it... do this with any game or product... the usually the 3/4 of the results are negative.

Toilet paper is archaic
Toilet paper is archaic and disgusting
Toilet paper is funny
Toilet paper is used for what

But I digress...

Given the quality control that both Intel and AMD go through, I highly doubt that 2 CPU manufacturers have been dishing out unstable CPUs for the past 4-5 years. I'm guessing that most players of this game have CPUs between 1 and 5 years old.

In addition, given the vast array of RAM manufacturers, I doubt unstable RAM is even an issue. If it was... It would take 3-4 minutes to load MS Word (although sometimes it feels like it does.. Am I right?) and in addition, Windows would frequently cease to function. (Windows 7 has never crashed on me... Civ 5 however goes down more frequently than Paris Hilton... am I right? *feel free to edit that last part out, moderators*)


"My advice is bring your computer back to spec and see if it helps. People often don't run proper diagnostics when overclocking, or if they do, they don't run them long enough. I'm not saying it's the problem, but it's where I'd start looking."

Diagnostics for overclocking:
Is it liquid cooled?
Do you have a coolant leak?
If air cooled sufficiently, how do you tollerate such loud fan noise?
Overclocking isn't worth the shortened lifespan of your CPU/GPU in most cases.

"Oh, and I use "Quick Combat" because turns take long if you're watching units fight. But that's an animation issue and not a performance one. "

Turns take too long? Maybe your CPU and RAM are unstable.

"But.. but... it's an animation issue.." You say...

Here's the bottom line.

The game is poorly written and hastily strewn together. Everyone knows that. Sid Meier should be ashamed of himself. Sure it looks beautiful and I love it but the engine is a distant relative of the Ford Pinto. The game engine is a turd. Polished up to sell for $49.99. It's a polished turd. Plain and simple.

You're looking at the number 1 turn-based strategy franchise in the history of gaming. If you took the standards that Blizzard Entertainment holds for it's time-vampire of a game, World of Warcraft, or the non-stop tweaking, updating and optimization of a flight sim like X-Plane and paired those qualities up with Civilization... you would have Civilization 1. Maybe Civ 2. At least those got bug fix patches. Of course I'm joking here. While Civ 1 and Civ 2 are fantastic... You can tell that World of Warcraft and X-Plane are someone's babies. You're looking at 5+ years of investment in 1 franchise by a handful of people that really care about their products.

WTF, Cid Meier... WTF?

That's seriously all the negativity I have to say... If you are reading this, Sid Meier... Civ 1 was your baby and you knocked that out of the park. Take back your franchise... or the open source community will... or Blizzard Entertainment. Hell yeah.

Moderator Action: There's no need to dig out ancient threads just to rant and troll around.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

Lanstro said:

My computer's somewhere between the minimum and recommended, and I've gotten used to playing the whole game on strategic view. Noticeably smoother than just using the minimum graphics settings.

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If you don't need all eye candies, get Civ3 and play a way better turn based strategy game.

charon2112 said:

He wasn't involved in IV's design either, would you say that one failed?

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It didn't fail, but there was a DECISIVE drop in the mechanical qualities of the game and some completely ludicrous "patches" that objectively made the game worse (*cough* 3.19 ----> Derp nerf the protectivez trait durrrrrrr)!

Sabretou said:

Sid stopped working, and Civ V failed.

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I thought so at first, but after months of Civ 5, I really can't play Civ IV anymore at all....it just doesn't keep me interested....hmmmmm

EDIT: I pulled this thread up from a search and didn't notice the age of thread.....apologies; not good for my first post

Turn off animations. Play a smaller map. Problem solved. I get that this isn't Civ4 - an epic empire builder. It's a strategic game you play to win. Don't need 20 opponents, five or six will do.

I paid less than NZ$1000 for my comp, so less than about US$700 or so, and Civ5 runs smooth - faster than Civ4 in the later years.

That's about all you need to do, really.

I started a new game last night and this thread came to mind, I didn't have anything to add when I originally read it.

Anyway, Choosing the Quick Combat option may cut down on between turn time a bit. I usually pick that option but forgot to last night and even on a small Small Continents map in the first 100 turns I was already getting tired of watching every combat animation of every unit within my view. On larger maps, I know from experience, watching all the combat animations in between turns can take longer than the end of the turn itself. Anyway, I don't think it makes a difference in the actual load time between turns, just removes the animations so at the end of each turn the camera doesn't pan to each unit that gets bombarded or attacked and make you watch the same thing over and over.

OP. Lot of posts, don't know if you've solved your problem yet. You've got a simialr pc set up to me. Except I have a better Graphics card, the Radeon 5850.

I used to have only 4 GB RAM. I never experienced slow turns times (though I have only played up to large size maps)

I recently bought more RAM and now have 12 GB. Since I did so, i've noticed an increase in turn speeds and all loading times. Difficult to say how big a percentage increase, but enough for me to notice.

The game actually makes use of 8GB if its available. When playing civ V my pc runs 4GB cached and 4 GB in use. So the simplest solution is to get 2GB more RAM.

I don't know if upgrading your graphics card will make any difference. I'd start with the RAM its cheap and if you've got a i7 920 yuor motherboard has lots and lots and lots of slots.

The solution to this problem is using a RAM disk.

Civ 5 doesn't use spare RAM properly. It seems to cache way to much in the virtual memory of the hard drive (page file) so you have to force it to use RAM by setting up a RAM disk for use as your page file. I run 8GB of RAM on a Win 7 system and set up a 2GB RAM disk using RAMDisk from DataRAM. If you have more memory you can go up to 4GB using the free version of RAMDisk. I then formatted the RAM disk and set up a page file using all of it. It made a huge difference in game speed.

Quick question related(ish) to the OP:
How do you disable the intro video? I can't find that option anywhere...

Go to "My Documents\My Games\Sid Meiers Civilization 5\" and open usersettings.ini in Notepad. Look for "SkipIntroVideo = 0" and change the 0 to 1. This disables the intro video and takes you directly to the game but the screen goes blank for a bit (18 seconds on my system).

I generally play co op multiplayer my friend has a less powerful pc than me and we find turning the city states off a huge help.It also transpires the game is more fun with them off the ai seems to fight better wars etc.

I love cpu demanding games. Supcom (also coded in LUA AFAIK is famous in that regard. I'd overclock my cpu's to the max and gaze at my positive simspeed (while simultaneously watching the game getting dragged down by the slowest cpu ).

Isthatafact said:

Overclocking isn't worth the shortened lifespan of your CPU/GPU in most cases.

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I've been overclocking cpu's and gpu's for more than 10 years. Never once has a chip died or degraded and I've done some pretty crazy overclocks (LN2 and extreme voltages). Of course you might argue that these aren't as bad as prolonged periods of high temperatures and high voltages. But you will simply not use the product long enough to experience negative effects of overclocking. You will want to use quality components rather than worry about the chip itself. If something goes bad it's always the cheap electronics on the motherboard, video card or in the PSU.

Overclocking to the max on fewer cores is generally more beneficial than having more cores at slower speed. Disabling HT is a good idea because it greatly reduces heat on i7 cpu's and somewhat increases performance too. I'm unsure as to how many cores Civ 5 can use but my guess is that disabling two cores on your quad and disabling HT while going for 4 to 5Ghz range is probably the best thing to do if you just have to play huge maps on high difficulty.