Turn times - Myths revealed

This was on the earth maps playing for domination, so the turns themselves took about half an hour (moving stacks was always quite tedious too). So yeah, it'd definitely be a case of select the game to load, walk away for half an hour, come back and play the turn, walk away for half an hour, etc. But indeed, it was not the best arrangement, so I got my own computer (this was back when I was like 14).

Before the patch, my turn times were about.. 5-10 seconds, now, mid-way, they are about 30 seconds. :| so... don't know <sarcasm>if I should blame something other than the patch</sarcasm>

TheMeInTeam said:

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.

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And CIV was also slower than III. Which I am dead certain was slower than II. I really don't think I need to explain why.

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.

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Failaxis? Really? Are we going to call them names now? After delivering such a nice expansion? Honestly, on huge maps I wait around 30 seconds during the late game, it goes higher only when I am fighting a war (I don't disable animations). This is in no way different than my experience with CIV, the vanilla version of that game sometimes takes 15 seconds on my quad-core i7 processor. It also drops to 10 FPS in globe view. I most certainly don't despise the game with such passion for it.

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

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Can you back up that claim? How come for almost two years it was in the game and nobody noticed it, yet all of a sudden it comes up?

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.

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On a standard map I'm not sure I EVER get to 20 seconds actually. No, I don't think I ever do. Again, maybe during war-time because of animations, but that's missing the point. And I usually spend the my break between turns contemplating on my next move.

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.

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You mean you select a unit, you tell it to move and it doesn't? That doesn't happen to me...

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.

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Wow, way to bash a game you actually aren't playing. So your whole comment was based on your experience with the game at launch? Isn't that ignoring a gigantic list of patches?

Anyways, video evidence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_Ga9htF45A turn 350. Clock me a turn that's "much slower" than 20 seconds.

I am not going to argue that at launch the game was a mess in more than one way. I'm not going to argue that it's technical performance even today can be uneven at times. But I am going to argue that it was the same thing with every Civ game, and yet here we are, all fans of the franchise despite the sometimes shoddy performance. Not to mention "Failaxis" have actually fixed a lot of issues the game had, including performance-related stuff, and turn times have improved notceably in my experience, something you can't confirm or deny, because you openly admitted you actually haven't played the game in a long time. Sometimes some patches break things, this goes for any game as complex as Civ, and these new issues get ironed out quickly enough. I don't see this being any different from IV, in fact I specifically remember people talking about turns taking up to several minutes on huge maps back then. Camikaze gave one such example.

So I am sorry, bit I almost completely disagree with your post. The game is hardly in the state that you make it out to be.

But then again, what do I know. I am the idiot who waited for two and a half minutes to get into the game every time he double-clicked the Caesar 3 icon all those years ago. Maybe I am used to this. What I do know is that I am not going to condemn the game for 20 second turns.

dexters said:

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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I had a game like that on a really slow computer in the early 90's. I set it up in the spare room with a treadmill. I'd play my turn, jump on the treadmill and watch the screen. When it was my turn again I knew I'd done my 25 minutes so I'd have another turn- and jump back on the treadmill.

I got very fit

I thought the fix for the lag after the patch was to change "EnableGameCoreThreading" to zero in config.ini? I didn't experience any notable difference but just posting it here to see if it might help anyone else.

KevinLancaster said:

I thought the fix for the lag after the patch was to change "EnableGameCoreThreading" to zero in config.ini? I didn't experience any notable difference but just posting it here to see if it might help anyone else.

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I did some timing on the thread core thing and posted the results in the thread about the patch.

For me (quad core) the results were negligible. It certainly didn't fix lag although on different computers the results may be totally different.

Guess I'm in luck, no slow-down.

Well, FWIW, my turn times are now down to a quite tolerable, for me, 15-20 secs early in the game, maybe stretching out to, at most, 30 secs, more or less, in the late game..... with "EnableGameCoreThreading=0", no auto save, and I installed "GameBooster"... I play on a dual core, i-3, 2.2 ...or is it 2.3... laptop....

TheMeInTeam said:

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 .

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It's a good thing the game hasn't really been broken since the first couple of patches, huh?

Has a new patch been released which addresses this? I've had G&K since release and haven't noticed any substantially longer turn times

Turn times are nice as always for me. But at the beginning of every turn it takes forever to wait for my automated carravels (1-3 of them usually) to finish moving.

Also, settling a new city and making a workboat work a tile takes up to 20 seconds to finish...

Before patch: late-game turn time was between 8 to 15 secs.
After patch(and G&K): late-game turn is between 20 to 40 secs.
I always play on small maps with 6 civs (including me).

I changed the "EnableGameCoreThreading" to 0 and experienced no significant lower turn times. I think my processor i5 460M isn't faster enough to handle this game now with the new enhancements and improved AI.

I just hope a patch could solve these problems, 'cause there's lots of people with the same long turn problem.