Difference between game speeds?

[Zjan]

I don't play this game for a long time now.
What is the difference between de game speeds? When I play I feel that marathon is just more clicking next turn then epic. I know you can move more in less years. But whats the difference between the speeds when talking about research speeds or building speeds?

 

[Sonereal]

Marathon is 3x longer than standard. Epic is 2x longer than Standard. Build times work the same way.

 

[Zjan]

So everything is the same except for having to click more "next turn"?

 

[CharlieM]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.....

If an Archer can move 2/turn in all game speeds, then an Archer can do a whole lot more fightin' with a longer game speed.... simple math: more turns = more chances to move and attack.

 

[Zjan]

Yeah ok, but you cant make more units per ... years in marathon then in epic?

 

[edcrane]

Do unit promotions require the same amount of XP?

 

[anti_strunt]

It's really just so much smoke and mirrors to ease suspension of disbelief over the common oddities in Civ, like how it takes a hundred years to walk between two neighbouring cities... It can be very for role playing or sandbox play, but warfare isn't that different and everything else is just slower, period.

 

[CurseUppl]

In Civ 4, marathon allowed you to make more use of units in each era before they became obsolete.

Not so much in Civ 5 with the way research is structured, not to mention marathon speed being so poorly designed, IMO. Production takes so long that by the time you build something, it's time to upgrade it anyway.

Really, research time should be upped while production build times aren't upped as much, allowing for more era specific combat, but apparently that wasn't the intention of the devs??

Eh well, modding ftw.

 

[Jaroth]

Everything is 2x/3x slower. Some prefer it because it takes longer for units to go obsolete.

Also, since everything is slowed down but your units' movement rates are not, you can think of them as having double/triple the speed.

Personally, I prefer standard speed.

 

[sesaMe]

slower speeds are much, much easier for three significant reasons

imagine killing an AI army.. on quick, they will constantly reenforce and you will probably get overwhelmed and lose units before you can heal, on marathon.. their army stays dead for another 20 or 30 turns which is pleanty of time to take all their cities. the human advantage in unit control is therefore more valuable

tech stagnates extremly badly in marathon, you can forget to build libaries and burn all your sientists on golden ages, you will never face a run away AI who is building units that you cant deal with

becaurse production is so slow in marathon, you will end up buying the majority of your units with gold, this benifits you in 2 ways, firstly it means that all your units will benifit from heroic epic and +xp buildings as they can all be purchaced in one city, secondly a human has many ways to generate gold. you get 75 gold for clearning a barbarian camp and 60 gold for selling a worker on marathon, while it is true that the cost of purchacing units also scale up, so do the number of barbarian camps and the number of AI workers (improvments take longer to build) not to mention that you have more time to puppet citys/city states which can be sold on to AI for armfulls of loot

this is a link to a game which demonstrates all of the above
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=392960

 

[Jediron]

While it's true what you say, marathon is very boring is my experience. They should let you build units more quickly, to make it less boring. Atleast you can fight some more, to past the time; instead of wondering around for ages with a handfull of units.

 

[CurseUppl]

While it's true what you say, marathon is very boring is my experience. They should let you build units more quickly, to make it less boring. Atleast you can fight some more, to past the time; instead of wondering around for ages with a handfull of units.

Wouldn't be so bad if it didn't take 5-10 seconds per turn on a huge map and that's with a quadcore. Wait times of upwards of 50 seconds in late game is just unacceptable and makes a 1000 turn marathon game unplayable.

 

[anti_strunt]

How are people adjusting their prefered game speed from 4? I played Marathon, slowly moving over to the slightly quicker Epic. With 5 I tried Epic but couldn't get through a single game... Now I'm playing Standard, and perhaps I'll soon start sliding towards Quick...