Disabling Combat Animations

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Edit the config.ini file found in "My Documents">"My Games">"Civilization V"

Under the heading [Disable Systems] change the value of the Combat element from 0 to 1 (which is backwards by industry standards - more evidence that however talented these guys are at making strategy games, they are inept software engineers)
There is another ini element in that file or another with a name to the effect of "Force quick combat." As far as I can tell, that one does nothing.

This is not a perfect solution; I think this setting is for debugging purposes. When you attack on your turn, after combat is resolved the screen may shift away to center on the "next unit" before you have a chance to view the results. Even so, this is vastly preferable to watching the same crappy fight scenes over and over.

It may be my imagination, but time between turns now feels shorter, as if these animations were being processed for battles taking place under the fog of war. If they are... that is simply inexcusably inefficient design. The coder responsible for that module should be tied to a post and flogged.
 
IIRC there is an option in the advanced game setup (before starting a game, in the part where you select barbarians, ancient ruins, etc on/off) that also let you choose "quick combat". I haven't tested it myself though, and obviously they put that option in the wrong place - in civ4 it was somewhere you could change it whenever you wanted. Hope this helps.
 
This thread deserves a bump...very useful.
 
Edit the config.ini file found in "My Documents">"My Games">"Civilization V"

Under the heading [Disable Systems] change the value of the Combat element from 0 to 1 (which is backwards by industry standards - more evidence that however talented these guys are at making strategy games, they are inept software engineers)
There is another ini element in that file or another with a name to the effect of "Force quick combat." As far as I can tell, that one does nothing.

This is not a perfect solution; I think this setting is for debugging purposes. When you attack on your turn, after combat is resolved the screen may shift away to center on the "next unit" before you have a chance to view the results. Even so, this is vastly preferable to watching the same crappy fight scenes over and over.

It may be my imagination, but time between turns now feels shorter, as if these animations were being processed for battles taking place under the fog of war. If they are... that is simply inexcusably inefficient design. The coder responsible for that module should be tied to a post and flogged.

OP, if that can be done mid-game, when I've just realized that I've got a great start but forgotten to turn off combat animations, that would be huge. Good stuff :goodjob:
 
A value of one means yes, on, etc. Under a heading of "disabled systems," you would set a one to disable something. You are turning on a mechanism that disables a standard behavior.

Nothing backwards here, it's just simple logic. (Please, no silly argument about how the industry never uses options to disable things rather than enable them.)

I've been in the industry for fifteen years, and this seems like a perfectly reasonable representation to me. If you look at the context, considering the different graphical effects you can disable, I would've made exactly the same choice in designing a representation.

Personally, I don't think the quality of Civ V is out of line with other games I've purchased recently. You wanna talk about a good urge to streamline taken overboard? Dragon Age 2 was far worse than Civ V in that regard.

It took a few months of patches before it got really stable and well balanced, but most complicated games are that way. I wish they hadn't gone quite so far in simplification, but then again we're all comparing Civ IV + Warlords + BtS on the one hand, and Civ V without any expansions.


In any case though, good tip.
 
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