Is Civ 5 built to be able to run quicker than Civ 4 at high end?

[Adhesive86]

Hi there,

I'm a seasoned Civ 4 player and have not really got into Civ 5... yet.

Problem is, that with civ i like to play big maps, lots of civs etc, and Civ 4 just seems not to be built to take that and no matter the processer or RAM, it still bottlenecks badly with big maps late game. I'm no expert but I heard this was due to the coding.

Question is... has this been sorted for Civ 5? My laptop is OK with civ 5 but large maps are slow. Since my laptop is pretty old (4gb ram, low end dedicated graphics etc), it may just be my laptop. I'm thinking of getting a new one, but obviously I'll be in less of a rush to do so if Civ 5 is going to be like Civ 4 in limiting the speed and responsiveness regardless.

Can anyone in the know tell me if Civ 5 is better than Civ 4 at handling big maps / lots of civs? (assuming good hardware)

Thanks

 

[timtofly]

I have a dell XPS 17" windows 7 with an i7 2670QM 2.2 GHz CPU, 8Gig RAMM, and NVidia Geforce GT 555M.
It does huge maps with 100's of cities with just a slight slow down towards the end. Turning off the battle animations speeds up turns as well.

I have a dell XPS 12" windows 8 with an i7 3537U 2.0 GHz CPU, 8Gig RAMM, and Intel HD4000.
It has about as good performance as the larger one, with the added touch screen ability.

So it does depend on the system and the game does slow down probably as much as Civ4 did.

 

[Adhesive86]

Thanks timtofly.

Out of interest, what is the wait between turns you have at game end?

With giant maps in Civ 4 it can be 1/2 min+ for me and i've been told that a quicker system won't really help much because of the coding.

 

[timtofly]

To be honest, I have never played a game of civ4. When I started Civ5 on a below specs computer, it could take 10 minutes for a turn to end. It would takes minutes, just going through the city screens, waiting for the computer to process everything. With my current systems it ranges between 1 and 2 minutes. To make all the moves in your turn and keep up with your cities, it could range from 8 to 14 minutes. It takes about 3 hours to play the first 200 turns. After that it could take about 2 hours for each 100 turns. After stealth bombers, you do not need a huge ground force. With a hand full of bombers, you can quickly take out enemy ground forces. It just depends on who can take out who's strategic resources first and defend your own. If they cannot build units, they cannot attack you.

To me it seems Civ5 plays smoother through out, and you do not have to worry about spamming units. I suppose in civ4, that was the key AI strength. Now with good ranged units, spamming does not pay.

So having better processing power is a must, or Civ5 may bog down too much to make it enjoyable. You can always go into your screens and look around while you are waiting, and if you are fast enough, you can click on the next unit, without waiting to see if the unit you just gave an order to does what it is supposed to do to.