Civ VI and the Surface Pro.

[Eagle Pursuit]

Back before launch, I had discussed the possibility of playing Civ VI on my Surface Pro 4 with others on this forum. I am now going to report on my experience.

The game booted at the absolute minimum graphical settings and I went further to toggle the "always start in strategic mode" setting. I played on a huge map, as I am wont to do. The game ran about as well as it does on my PC. In the 80-ish turns that I played, it never crashed, although my Surface became quite warm.

My major complaint is that the UI is teeny tiny on an already small screen. I tried to fiddle with the resolution settings to make it appear larger, but it wouldn't let me confirm the changes.

I used a combination of touchpad, touchscreen, and stylus to interact with the game. It was a bit cumbersome, but workable. I have a mouse that works on my Surface, but I didn't bother hooking it up to try it with Civ VI.

I don't intend to use my Surface as my primary Civ-playing device, but it's nice to know I can take Civ with me when I travel.

 

[White Out]

Surface pros come in a lot of flavours too. If you have a very basic surface pro ... you're going to have a bad time. But I can see how the fancier SP4's could play it basic

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

My Surface Pro 4 has a Intel i5-6300U 2.5Ghz 64-bit processor and 8GB of RAM if that is helpful information. It has an Intel HD 520 integrated graphics card.

Incidentally, Civ V crashes after 25 turns or so when I try to play it on this. So I am rather impressed that it performs as well as it does.

 

[White Out]

My Surface Pro 4 has a Intel i5-6300U 2.5Ghz 64-bit processor and 8GB of RAM if that is helpful information. It has an Intel HD 520 integrated graphics card.

Incidentally, Civ V crashes after 25 turns or so when I try to play it on this. So I am rather impressed that it performs as well as it does.

No video card is really taxing, but ya, those are decent specs. My SP3 wasn't quite as beefy

 

[Dale]

Game plays great on my SP4 i7 8GB. I play it in touch mode all the time on the train to-from work.

 

[Simo]

I have the original surface pro and game runs fine with no crashes (other than the known bugs that crash any machine such as spys on city capture).

Agree its a bit tedious as a touch machine the icons are a bit small but performance wise its fine for the spec's of the machine

 

[PostConsumerWat]

I have the original Surface Pro the game plays OK. It tones the graphics down, but it's OK. I just hook up a mouse.

 

[craney1987]

With the humble deal on civ vi at the minute I thought I'd pick it up for my Mrs. But she has a surface pro 3 and I was worried it might not be up to standard.
Did everyone decide if surface can handle civ vi?

It runs
Core i5 4300@1.9 ghz 2.5ghz. (not sure why there is a second one there)
4gb ram
64 bit os

 

[DWilson]

I can say that I play it pretty comfortably on my GPD Win, who's specs are only impressive when soley considering the fact that it's the size of a Nintendo 3DS. The 5.5 inch screen isn't the best, but the built in game pad's mouse mode works well, and I enjoy the size of the UI when scaled to -0.15000000 (may be too small for many, in which case I would encourage trying -0.10000000). I can play on standard maps fine, though turns aren't very fast and it gets mildly warm. Play time before charge is pretty good, btw. Added bonus, the full keyboard means hot keys are available, and the GamePad can also emulate the mouse scroll wheel, so zooming is easy. Haven't really tested the touchscreen.

Bonus, the second generation of the GPD Win should be much more powerful and has a slightly larger screen.

 

[Lanthar]

I've got the top of the line Surface Book, and Civ VI performance is not an issue.

The deficiencies in the UI are magnified on the Surface Book, though, and I was very disappointed when they didn't keep Civ V's touchscreen control scheme. I like the experience of playing Civ V on the Surface Book, but do not like the experience playing Civ VI.

Civ V played fine on a Surface Pro 1. Both the Surface Pro and Surface Book get hot when the video card and CPU's are under load.

 

[craney1987]

I went ahead and bought the game. The ui is much smaller as is to be expected, and we were similarly dissapointed with the touch screen experience. The touch pad on the keyboard works well though. the game runs smoothly with 8 civs and leader animations switched off on a standard map size. I probably wouldn't want to push it too much harder though. This is fine for us, as we want shorter games when we play together anyway.

 

[Turrdy]

I have a surface book (mid-range model) and i did some tweaking to the resolution, i made the game run at 1500x1000p (that's a quarter of what the screen resolution is: 3000x2000p) and now it runs at a nice framerate and with normal sized UI! graphics settings are still quite low though (compared to my normal computer...).

At first i had problems with the rescaling, it ran on only 1/4 of the screen, in the middle with a huge border around it and still very small UI. I don't know what i did to it that it went full screen but i think it had to do with DPI-scaling in windows. i can look it up if you want the information!

 

[Tiger Genocide]

I have been playing on my i7 SurfaceBook for almost a year now. I have had a few problems here and there, but nothing major or that I did not figure out.