Speed Civ 5 Up Between Turns?

Right now I'm playing on Large map, (Edit: Renessaince Era, 190 turns in), and only have my 1 large continent fully explored. The game is just SLOW, and takes a very long time between turns, so much so that I'm not really motivated to even finish this game since it would take so long.

My specs are as follows: Windows 7 x64, Core i7 920 (OC'd to 3.2ghz), 6gbram, 80gb SSD, ATI 4890). I can pretty much play any modern game fully maxed out without any hitches - so why does Civ 5 give me slow issues?

Directx 9, 10, 11 give me all the same performance speeds. I have everything maxed out on the detail section, and I'm guessing if I lower something I may get better performance - what do you guys suggest? What do you lower to get the most bang for the buck performance/image quality?

I did a quick search, and it seems most of the technical issues are associated with bugs and crashes - and my Civ 5 is so far bug free / crash free, so I don't know if I fall into that category.

Hey everyone I'm a long-time reader, first-time poster. Civ 5 turn processing times increase drastically in mid-late game and it would be interesting to read any tips players have to increase game speed. Personally, I lower the frequency of auto-saving and disable the intro. What else can be done?

For the record, I play on a computer above recommended specs and am most interested in game-setting hints.

Thanks!

I switch to strategic map before I hit next turn. It was in an article somewhere, and seems to speed it up a bit.

Speaking of the intro video, today I was playing a game and was about a half hour in when it froze. I had to ctrl alt dlt to get out, and recieved the "sid....stopped working" with a black screen. Just after I clicked ok to close the game I saw a flash of the intro video, right where it ended from hitting enter when starting the game. It was a still shot, and wasn't playing, but I knew it was where I stopped it because it stops the same place everytime I hit enter. I just think it's messed up that this videos still floating around in there after I canceled it to get to the menu, and no I wasn't running the program twice . I can't help thinking that stupid video is frozen in pc land eating my resources.

I'd edit it to not play, but the time it takes for me to hit enter, and the time it takes for the black screen before the menu instead is longer.

tylerryan - smells like a memory leak to me, but im no techie. most likely on the client side not yours. check your cpu memory usage, and if it continually climbs until it crashes your pc then an easy fix would be to simply restart the game every so often

Ya I'll check that out, it happened today for the first time. Then it happened again. I was worried I had a corrupted save, but I've since played for a few hours. I have had memory leaks before I think because after leaving the game windows would ask me if I wanted to switch to windows basic scheme due to low resources. I play standard maps and have 4gb ram, and it's only popped up twice asking me that, each time I'd still be in the early game.

Ok, I just put all settings down to medium, and it's not running any faster.

I've timed how long it takes between turns, and it's anywhere from 30-90 seconds, depending on what's going on. Rarely does it last shorter than 30 seconds. This is with only half the world being "discovered" on a map that isn't even the largest in the game.

I know my Vid car is up to snuff, because I have absolutely 0 framerate issues - it's just the time taken between turns. My CPU isn't THE fastest available right now, but it's pretty darn close. I don't think I even want to try this on my core i3 laptop.

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.

To the OP: How much ram do you have? and what kind of video card...?

The autosaving works for me, never even thought about it, just halved the frequency for now and that makes a difference...

Hey - keep these tips coming. I'm not playing on a low-end machine, but it's driving me mad how long some turns take. There shouldn't be much excuse, frankly...

I always use strategic view when going through uninteresting times, like the last rounds of a space race victory, or a particularly one-sided war. In addition to seeming to simply make everythign go faster, this is a quick in-game way to skip all attack animations, which otherwise has to be set in advanced options before the game. Taking out those animations can make the game speed up a LOT when you don't have to watch every city-state fling arrows at every passing ship, etc.

I run this on a Phenom 9950 X4, 2.6 Ghz and a Radeon 3200 HD onboard card. Time between turns for me is rarely more than 20 seconds at max. Even then, I play the game on Strategic because of low framerates, but 30-90 seconds sounds pretty absurd.

I think this is a technical bug of some sort.

Tylerryan79 said:

"sid....stopped working"

Click to expand...

Sid stopped working, and Civ V failed.

Might be, I haven't updated it yet, maybe I'll do that. But in the update reports it doesn't say anything about performance updates does it?

Also - what size of maps do you usually play on, how many turns in do you usually go, and what average settings do you use (low,med,high)?

Thanks.

How many civs and city states are surviving in your games?

It seems that in another thread about this subject some peoples found that the time between turns increase as the "technology level" advance (more choice must be taken into account so it is normal) and that it is comparable between a city-state and an ennemy civ
If you keep 12 city states(CS) and 3 ennemy civs (EC) (others may have been killed before the critical period) you will have 15 cycles of AI that may takes each from 2-3 seconds for a CS to 4-6 seconds for an EC for a between turn duration from 30 to 60 seconds

Sabretou said:

Sid stopped working, and Civ V failed.

Click to expand...

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

Strategic view will make the game a lot faster. As will smaller maps, or lower difficulties (because the AI has fewer units). On the highest difficulties the AI has an obscene number of units and it really slows the game down.

douglasstone said:

Hey everyone I'm a long-time reader, first-time poster. Civ 5 turn processing times increase drastically in mid-late game and it would be interesting to read any tips players have to increase game speed. Personally, I lower the frequency of auto-saving and disable the intro. What else can be done?

For the record, I play on a computer above recommended specs and am most interested in game-setting hints.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Until the add the turn animations off for friendly units I foudn that turning down the graphics liek shadows and resselation helped processing turns. Why? All that zooming around the map to focus on units takes time.

Turn speed does not relate to the graphic effect or detail level. it's on the AI complexity. the more civ or CS you have on the same map, the longer you will have to wait.
I am using a laptop with very marginal hardware spec to play Civ 5, i got 30 to 90 seconds waiting time per turn as well. so i think the hardware is not the issue, the algorithm is.

direct x 9

Someone can shoot me down for speculating on this but here goes...

I suspect the game engine uses an interpreter rather than compiled code. (I apologise for the techie term; I was a software pro for a few decades.) If the flight simulators that I worked in teams building 20 years ago ran like that, no airline would have bought them. The complexity is less in Civ5 than a flight simulator and, though your hardware may be less powerful, it should still be able to work out what to draw in a split second, even if your graphics card won't display it instantly.

Why would the design team do that? The excuse will be "easy to mod". The real reason may be "easy for the design team to iterate toward a playable game". But the benefit of interpreted code isn't all for Firaxis. In return we ought to get Civ5 playable (in gameplay terms) and earlier (in months and years) than a compiled version. However, in return we also get something that takes minutes to load a saved game and 30-90 seconds between turns.

Let me put my cynical hat on for a moment... Suppose the gameplay bugs and balances are eventually ironed out, at we find - at last - that we like what we've got. Firaxis then converts the interpreted code into compiled code. This is quite easy in principle and I'm guessing a small team like theirs could do this perhaps in 3 months at the outside (including proper QA this time). It's even possible they could automate some of the conversion process. Then they sell us an upgrade that does nothing to the gameplay but speeds up the game engine itself. Money for old rope? Perhaps. But if they priced it right (like $14.99) I bet they'd have sufficient takers to make a nice profit!