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[Draco84]

Huge Marathon (if that matters) max civs and city states, the end game after turn 900 or so starts to take about 30-40 seconds (basically unplayable)

Using a i7 from 2009, with 24GB ram(irrelevant I think) and GTX 970 (important).

Anything less than Huge and the load times are quite reasonable for me.

 

[dexters]

I have around 20 seconds per turn from turn 180-200 till the end of the game in standard speed/maps. Huge maps are unplayable for me.

How long is a late-game turn on your setup?

I havent benchmarked how long my turns take on huge maps max factions.

But it is Around a minute or less including line of sight animations of what the AI is doing near me. Longer during wars naturally but I don't have my setup set to skip AI moves when it affects me of my cs friends.

For the most part I am not waiting but just watching the ibt unfold with AI making their moves so i know what to respond to. I don't feel there is any waiting at all.

 

[Plus Ultra]

Around a minute or less including line of sight views of what the AI is doing near me. Longer during wars but I don't have my setup set to skip AI moves when it affects me of my cs friends.

That just confirms I am too unpatient. 1 minute or less per turn (no war) is unplayable for me.

My limit is around 10-15 seconds. More than that and I tend to go slightly crazy or suddenly start being aware that I should probably be doing something else, like sleeping.

 

[Teproc]

I want to spend more time playing than waiting, at least on standard maps and standard game length. 8 players, no mods.

If you're spending more time waiting than playing in CiV with those settings, I don't know what to tell you. You either have a 20 year old computer or are playing very, very, very fast.

I think loading times ingame are fine on standard in CiV, though it becomesa bit of a concern on huge maps. I'd be nice if they were shortened in CiVI, but it's low priority for me (I'm much more annoyed by the loading time going through the mods panel).

ETA : I see you mention 20 seconds AI turn... how is it even possible for your turn 200 to be quicker than that ? I guess if you never ever play domination ? 20 seconds is a teeny bit longer than it ideally would be, but come on. It's a grand strategy game, you have stuff to think about.

 

[dexters]

That just confirms I am too unpatient. 1 minute or less per turn (no war) is unplayable for me.

My limit is around 10-15 seconds. More than that and I tend to go slightly crazy or suddenly start being aware that I should probably be doing something else, like sleeping.

Do you not watch AI moves that might concern you? FYI it is not significantly longer than other Civ games I've played.

 

[Draco84]

If only I could disable the animation for planes I would be happy watching the enemy turns, but instead I turn on quick combat and quick movement.

 

[Plus Ultra]

ETA : I see you mention 20 seconds AI turn... how is it even possible for your turn 200 to be quicker than that ? I guess if you never ever play domination ? 20 seconds is a teeny bit longer than it ideally would be, but come on. It's a grand strategy game, you have stuff to think about.

I guess I've played too much Civ V and unless I'm playing domination (which I very rarely do) the late-game is a "build this, renew this trade deal, click next turn" fest.

Which makes me think the problem might not be the loading times but the lack of decisons in that late-game for cultural, diplomatic and science victory...

 

[Gbest]

Using quick combat & quick movement improves turn times in civ5.

I'm using a mod called "Quick Turns" which allows you to select quick combat & quick movement for the AI and city states with options like peace / war.

I'm also using the mod "Faster Aircraft Animations" which helps a lot in the late game.

 

[Plus Ultra]

Using quick combat & quick movement improves turn times in civ5.

I'm using a mod called "Quick Turns" which allows you to select quick combat & quick movement for the AI and city states with options like peace / war.

I'm also using the mod "Faster Aircraft Animations" which helps a lot in the late game.

I'll check those out, Thanks Gbest.

 

[AriochIV]

Unless you're at war, there are a lot of turns in the late game with no notifications or units to move where you're just pounding "end turn" (especially if you play on Epic or Marathon). In those cases I may spend more time waiting than playing.

AI turn processing on a normal map in the late game can get to 20-30 seconds, and that's really too long. My computer isn't a monster, but it's less than 2 years old and far surpasses the "recommended" system requirements. Since the game is essentially 6 years old, that's not really acceptable. It was almost unplayable on the older machine I had when it was first released in 2010.

Ed Beach has said in interviews that the new engine should allow faster turn times, but of course he couldn't be specific this early (optimization is usually one of the last things that gets done). Unfortunately, Firaxis seems to be rather poor at optimization, if Civ V and XCOM2 are anything to go by.

 

[dexters]

Unless you're at war, there are a lot of turns in the late game with no notifications or units to move where you're just pounding "end turn" (especially if you play on Epic or Marathon). In those cases I may spend more time waiting than playing.

AI turn processing on a normal map in the late game can get to 20-30 seconds, and that's really too long. My computer isn't a monster, but it's less than 2 years old and far surpasses the "recommended" system requirements. Since the game is essentially 6 years old, that's not really acceptable. It was almost unplayable on the older machine I had when it was first released in 2010.

Ed Beach has said in interviews that the new engine should allow faster turn times, but of course he couldn't be specific this early (optimization is usually one of the last things that gets done). Unfortunately, Firaxis seems to be rather poor at optimization, if Civ V and XCOM2 are anything to go by.

Well I wouldn't doubt that as civ6 will likely be coded with quad core as minimum. This will cover most i5 and AMD setups.

People forget Civ5 min required is dual core so it's very likely all the AI calculation is going through 1 CPU core regardless of processor used.

I do recall multicore support was later patched in so you could pull up menus and check stuff ibt so there are incremental advantages to having more cores but probably not much.

 

[m15a]

Well I wouldn't doubt that as civ6 will likely be coded with quad core as minimum. This will cover most i5 and AMD setups.

Most i5 desktop setups, not most i5 laptop setups. I think that's the main factor that might prevent requiring a quad core system.

 

[Plus Ultra]

Ed Beach has said in interviews that the new engine should allow faster turn times.

The fact that he acknowledges the problem and is working on fixing it is fantastic news.

Unfortunately, Firaxis seems to be rather poor at optimization, if Civ V and XCOM2 are anything to go by.

Civ V was somehow able to go beyond "badly optimized" into uncharted territory.

My setup goes beyond anything available in the market on 2006 (i5 4670k/SSD/GTX970) and the game simply... ignores all the available processing power at its disposal.

 

[Elhoim]

Regarding Civ V, get the Unnoficial Patch from Gazebo. The work they did to speed up the game is fantastic. That along with the Quick Turn mods makes a hell of a difference.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=497

 

[omarshaheen]

Unfortunately, Firaxis seems to be rather poor at optimization...

This comment actually sums it! Prior to the introduction of Civ3 waiting times were not an issue, but it seems to have gotten much worse as the number of 'features' added to the game expanded, I remember in Civ 3 the reason for the extra 'waits' between turns were due to the introduction of resources, now whenever a link is broken in the game the game's engine would have to update its internal database to reflect the now missing 'saltpeter' for example and make sure that cities affected by the missing trade link are all now conforming to the missing trade resource. You could easily identify the reason for the extra waits because if you try to pillage a road (or if the AI does it), you are expected to have a frozen screen for something like 10 to 15 seconds, imagine now if you have an AI war raging with both sides pillaging tiles every turn!

Now, if there is anything that we can extrapolate from our Civ 3 analysis, it is that the extra 'features' brought to Civ 4/5 have all resulted in similar mishaps when handling the game engine, Civ 5 was even worse in that regard, I did try to profile the 'reason' why turns would take too much time to process checking what the AI is doing to cause such delay (especially in peace time), and as it turns out sometimes this happens very early on for quite a few turns when in fact the AI is not doing anything at all! not even building roads... Which gave me the impression that the features introduce in Civ (since resources were introduced back in Civ 3), are not being handled well by the game-engine, in fact I believe that the cause for most of the delay is bad code maybe loops that occur in decision making by AI civs causing unnecessary delay (and probably bad or no decisions eventually).

If you want to judge the time taken by the AI to finish its turn and whether its justified or not, think along human lines and see whether a human would take that long to process the AI's turn, then factor in the fact that the processor can do 1 billion operations per second (limited by memory bandwidth mainly), you would realize that no AI should take more than a couple of seconds even when at war.

So the reason for long wait times is that the trend of introducing more features and ideas to the game has not been accompanied by an effort to optimize the game engine properly, and for people who like to play on large maps (which is really what makes civ fun), the game has to be played with some other side activity,...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I wasn't saying they were interesting decisions ;-) I was referring exactly to what you described, clicking through building lists, renewing trade routes, listening to leaders - I want less of those

I want less of these too, but it's a tertiary problem. The main problems are 1) the UI design in V is painfully inefficient and 2) you spend as much or more time waiting than playing in some cases.

Yes, reducing rote patterns of micromanagement makes the game more playable without altering meaningful decisions, so it's almost strictly positive as a change. However, note that if you wanted to, you could manage 60 cities in Civ IV in less time than you can manage 10 in civ V, by a wide margin.

Was it efficient to leave things to the governor? No, not really, but if you wanted you could do that and avoid prompts up the wazoo when you knew you were going to win. With much less turn time (though still a little problematic) you also could finish a winning position faster.

Better still, you could click on a city and queue or modify queue without even going into the city screen. These are micro niceties that make Civ V look archaic in comparison. Civ V has micro UI on the level of good 1990's games, not good ~2010 games, and nasty turn times. Civ VI can do better and I really hope it manages.

ETA : I see you mention 20 seconds AI turn... how is it even possible for your turn 200 to be quicker than that ? I guess if you never ever play domination ? 20 seconds is a teeny bit longer than it ideally would be, but come on. It's a grand strategy game, you have stuff to think about.

The only reason I can't handle mid-late game wars on a 60 second timer is that the game's engine can't keep up with my inputs. I have to wait after moving a unit, get forced-deselection nonsense, and can't rely on input buffering because it's inconsistent. Outside of war one doesn't need anywhere near that.

I realize not everyone plays quickly, but when you do and IBT represents half or more of your play time in the late game (especially true when doing peaceful win conditions) the game gets dull fast.

 

[Civ5Play]

Regarding Civ V, get the Unnoficial Patch from Gazebo. The work they did to speed up the game is fantastic. That along with the Quick Turn mods makes a hell of a difference.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=497

Are you referring to the community patch or the unofficial patch?

I use the CP and still find in between turns (esp with EUI on) to be quite lengthy in the mid to later part of the game.

 

[Acken]

Turn times will depend on how good multithreading is for AI turns. THe biggest issue in civ5 is that the AI is processed on a single core afaik.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Turn times will depend on how good multithreading is for AI turns. THe biggest issue in civ5 is that the AI is processed on a single core afaik.

No. Multithreading itself doesn't grant anything and have a lot of potential to actually slow down things.

Since Civilization is consequent turn game, so biggest parts of the AI can't be calculated during player turn. And by biggest part I mean tactics in the first place.

 

[Acken]

? what are you talking about. That has nothing to do with calculating during the player turn.