Speed of Civ IV, V, VI, VII... A descending trend?

[Naokaukodem]

No it’s not. The limit is and always has been 12.

No no, I've just tried it and could add up to 19 civs.

 

[Naokaukodem]

It's even 20 (without editing any file whatsoever), counting the player's one. (on the EGS version)

 

[pokiehl]

You’re right, it is 20. I was thinking of default values and the multiplayer hard cap.

My mistake!

 

[Lazy sweeper]

Civ III had 31+1 civilizations available to play
Civ IV had 18+1
Civ V had 22+1
Civ Vi has 19+1

It seems to me that also map dimensions has been on a shrinking trends

 

[Quintillus]

So I'm wondering, in the light of this example, what can take power to make those AI turns. Eventhough even in my own turn, in Old World, I saw lags all over the place in inability to play due to camera/game freezes. They say they made the minimal for a ~2014 computer, but I fail to see what such 4X could do more than Civ to be unable to run ok on slower ones.

In other words : I couldn't witness, because my inability to play, what could demand more powerful computers to play that game. Anyone ?

One difference is that Old World is memory-hungry, and that was more true before they optimized it some time in the latter part of 2022, IIRC. I had 20 GB of RAM in my desktop at the time, and playing extra-large maps such as the Middle East + Persia map (which shipped with the game), that was not enough memory, which slowed everything down drastically compared to when playing on a Standard size map (both the smoothness of camera/game movement during my turn, as you describe, and AI turn times). Much as try to play Huge Civ IV maps on my Pentium IV with 512 MB of RAM slowed things down tremendously in late 2006. Going up to 32 GB of RAM helped Old World a lot, and doubling to 1 GB of RAM helped Civ IV a lot.

So if you are reading this and thinking "I have 8 GB or 16 GB, and I last played Old World in 2021/2022" - that's probably it. It may be better today, if I'd started playing 6 months later I probably wouldn't have needed to upgrade as the optimizations were considerable.

Aside from that, I had no complaints on my desktop, which was hardly a barn-burner by that point. I still had a decent graphics card, a Radeon RX 480 8 GB from 2016, I think I played on Medium? Relatively ancient midrange CPU (Core i5 2500K, purchased in 2011). I can't really say whether Civ VI ran better as I didn't play much of VI until I'd bought my new laptop at the end of 2022.

As for the why - likely a combination of a small studio not having had the time/expertise on how to optimize upfront, and using the fairly general-purpose Unity engine for Old World. Unity is popular as it makes development of games easier and thus can mean the difference between the game being completed or not, but it has somewhat of a reputation for being the engine behind un-optimized games. How much of that is on the engine itself being inefficient, versus it being popular among developers who have an idea for a game but not a lot of experiencing optimizing, I couldn't tell you. Wouldn't be surprised if it's some of A, some of B. As far as I know, Civilization (except IV) uses its own engine, so Firaxis can optimize to their heart's content if they have the time and budget to do so.

I will note that the Old World developers have been reliable about updates over the years, and often swing by the Old World section of CivFanatics and chime in to discussions; some of them used to be Civ modders at CivFanatics or Apolyton. You may recognize their names as well!

 

[Vandlys]

Civ III had 31+1 civilizations available to play
Civ IV had 18+1
Civ V had 22+1
Civ Vi has 19+1

It seems to me that also map dimensions has been on a shrinking trends

I still don't get how you use trends. I mean, yeah, if you solely consider Civilization III to be the trend, then it has been shrinking. If you only consider IV, V, and VI, the trend would be that in Civilization we would see 23+1 civilizations.

You would also have to consider their DLC model, however, and factor in if that will change anything. The NFP and 2k business model of adding more DLCs and microtransactions makes it possible that we get fewer civs at launch than in any previous title. But I could also imagine the game still releasing with about 20 civs and some new ones to be added relatively soon after, but instead of dropping them in batches, releasing them piece-meal style.

 

[pokiehl]

It’s also not true that map size has been consistently shrinking. 4 of the 6 map sizes in Civ 6 are larger than they were in Civ 5.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Civ III had 31+1 civilizations available to play
Civ IV had 18+1
Civ V had 22+1
Civ Vi has 19+1

It seems to me that also map dimensions has been on a shrinking trends

Civ III didn't have city-states that took up places on the map either.

Either way if Civ VI had more than Civ IV, but still both less than Civ V, that's not a descending trend either?

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Civ III didn't have city-states that took up places on the map either.

Either way if Civ VI had more than Civ IV, but still both less than Civ V, that's not a descending trend either?

This among other things.

It is simply not possible to do an accurate comparison in numbers of Civs or map sizes between different versions of Civs given that:

1. The number of playable Civs since Civ IV has been 'enhanced' by City States that also take up city-sized areas on the maps. That makes the number of playable Civs possible to place on the same-sized map less, and required a change in the number of playable Civs in each game and map-size. Given that, including DLCs, there are now 57 City States available in Civ VI and every configuration of the game (Dual to Huge Map) has more City States than Civs on it, this is not a small consideration.

2. While Civ VI started with '19 + 1' playable Civs, it now has 50 available with all the DLCs. The addition of DLCs, especially the number of additional Civs and other features in them in the last few game iterations, also makes real comparisons among games marketed in the past 25+ years very difficult.

3. Finally, Map Size is not just a comparison of numbers of tiles/hexes generated for a map. It is, more accurately, the number of Playable tiles/hexes. Sea Tiles completely locked behind ice, or land tiles completely composed of snow and ice, scarcely count as playable parts of the map until the very end of game. I would add that for the first third of most games open ocean tiles are not playable without Unique (sea) Units and so are only Potential parts of the map. Changing the movement of units makes a big difference in the apparent Map Size - if it takes you 10 extra turns to cross the same number of hexes/tiles, that map has suddenly become much larger than it was, regardless of the base number of tiles on the map. Change the basic movement of land (dismounted) units from 2 to 3 tiles/turn in Civ VI, and all of Civ VI's maps suddenly become functionally smaller.

So, 'raw' figures on numbers of Civs provided in initial release, or Size of Maps measured in numbers of hexes/tiles are only a small part of the story, and no longer an accurate basis for comparing games, if they ever were.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

2. While Civ VI started with '19 + 1' playable Civs, it now has 50 available with all the DLCs. The addition of DLCs, especially the number of additional Civs and other features in them in the last few game iterations, also makes real comparisons among games marketed in the past 25+ years very difficult.

I'm pretty sure that number was in reference to how many playable civs could be on one map, not the number of available civs to choose from at launch. Because that number would be 18, with the Aztecs coming to 19.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I'm pretty sure that number was in reference to how many playable civs could be on one map, not the number of available civs to choose from at launch. Because that number would be 18, with the Aztecs coming to 19.

Still a meaningless number for comparison, since number of Possible Civs on the map, as stated in Point 2, has been massively modified in the later versions of the game by including the new category of city-sized entities called City States.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Still a meaningless number for comparison, since number of Possible Civs on the map, as stated in Point 2, has been massively modified in the later versions of the game by including the new category of city-sized entities called City States.

I'm in agreement with that. Just point out that what was posted was the max number of playable civs on one map, not the number of civs at each game launch.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

As always it is worth noting that Humankind, which has more beautiful graphics than civ6 and a comparable scale, has infinitely shorter turn loading times as it doesn't have 1UPT and every AI doesn't have to move dozens of units every turn and resolve their individual traffic jams

(for similar reasons of computational resources that system also had better combat AI on release than civ6 had after four years of patches and expansions, with much smaller budget)

That's EXACTLY the point!

 

[_ViKinG_]

Just look at the new game that is coming this year. Ara history untold is what civ 7 should look like. And it will have simultanius turns so everything happens at the same time with no turn time at all. The game looks much better than any civ game.