Observations from a new Civ 5 player

You mean like you get a 30 second load between turns? I don't get that much and my PC, while good in the day, is getting on in years. I run music in the background too.

I strongly suggest you actually clock post turn 200 turns on a standard map or larger. My machine is above recommended specs for civ V in every way. The early game turns are much less than 30. End game turns? Now you see where I'm putting an average of 30. If you play huge maps and assert sub-30 seconds turn times on huge maps, I have nothing to say to you other than that I want your supercomputer.

Also note that a 10 second average turn delay still means you are *still* spending nearly an hour doing absolutely nothing while "playing" this game on some maps, staring at a circular globe.

I STRONGLY believe that those of you coming to Firaxis defense inexplicably here are in fact spending more time doing nothing than you'd like to admit. Pull out a stop watch and see what happens at turn 50, 100, 150, etc. Try to tell me that you aren't losing an hour or more per game just on waiting turns.
 
TheMeInTeam:

I cheat. If I don't have any AI units I need to watch for, I surf while waiting turns. Shrug.
 
It's the "doing nothing" in between turns that worries you? The "doing nothing" IN the turn is what kills me...

:lol::lol::lol:

Too true.....

Re: TMIT, i play Small maps (DX9), i lower the sea level, add an extra AI and a couple of city states and my 4 year old PC gets by without toooo long between turns.

If i want a huuge map, with dozens of AI's, i go back to BtS.;)
 
:lol::lol::lol:

Too true.....

Re: TMIT, i play Small maps (DX9), i lower the sea level, add an extra AI and a couple of city states and my 4 year old PC gets by without toooo long between turns.

If i want a huuge map, with dozens of AI's, i go back to BtS.;)

How long is "without toooo long"? Did you measure it?
 
How long is "without toooo long"? Did you measure it?

Nope, i don't time it.

I would say that mostly it is an "acceptable" delay, but it does get worse as the game goes on.

Far more annoying is the city bombarding an fortified barb or a barb ship bombarding a stationary defender, turn after turn, century after century.....:mad:
 
I STRONGLY believe that those of you coming to Firaxis defense inexplicably here are in fact spending more time doing nothing than you'd like to admit. Pull out a stop watch and see what happens at turn 50, 100, 150, etc. Try to tell me that you aren't losing an hour or more per game just on waiting turns.
Probably. It is less bad than CivIV though. I've heard it said on these forums that it was those trade route calculations that drove my PC insane, because they had to to be recalculated every turn. Of course, the 100s of units didn't help.

That said, that does make me wonder what the computer is doing nowadays. It is a bit faster than CivIV, but not by much. So what's it doing?
 
I STRONGLY believe that those of you coming to Firaxis defense inexplicably here are in fact spending more time doing nothing than you'd like to admit. Pull out a stop watch and see what happens at turn 50, 100, 150, etc. Try to tell me that you aren't losing an hour or more per game just on waiting turns.

I don't waste any time at all playing.

Get a second monitor and do something else while it takes its turn and you'll soon find the game waits for you rather than the other way around :lol: (Like I'm writing this post for example!)

Seriously though, it's a teeny tiny issue that really doesn't warrant the highlight (across no less than 4 threads I've seen so far) you're giving it.
 
Actually, turn times is one of the biggest issue with the game in my opinion too. I think it's the single biggest reason that prevents me from having the patience to finish a game. Then again, maybe I need to learn that playing on maps smaller than "standard" isn't necessarily making for an inferior game. I'd be ok with a long wait if I knew there was lots of well-optimised AI code going on in the background, but until I see the core source released I can't bring myself to believe that. I'm fairly sure there's some really slow code buried in some algorithms in there, just like civ4's trade route calculations.

The biggest issue is the unergonomic UI. I could write enough posts to make a whole thread on that subject.
 
well, obviously the "AI" needs all that time to calculate how to suicide its generals, archers, workers, settlers and their wifes too against your impenetrable forces of two warrios and one archer... you got to give it to them, the "AI" is very creative in suicidal matters. Kudos to little Joni for such an advanced suicidal algorithm!

If there is someone here that had or has suicidal thoughts, ask him/her how long it takes to think about it, let alone come up with a creative way to do it... weeks? months? years? And you ask the "AI" to do it in milisecs?

Takes time, be patient...
 
I don't waste any time at all playing.

Get a second monitor and do something else while it takes its turn and you'll soon find the game waits for you rather than the other way around :lol: (Like I'm writing this post for example!)

Seriously though, it's a teeny tiny issue that really doesn't warrant the highlight (across no less than 4 threads I've seen so far) you're giving it.

One thing each and every response I've seen to me here has in common is that nobody has actually timed their turns :lol:.

Not everyone is willing to drop 100's of dollars on a monitor just so they can dual screen. Hell, not everyone wants to "not play" while "playing". Sometimes, a person playing a game actually wants to play it, you know?

I'm not going to take any claim of it being a "teeny tiny issue" seriously until the person making it can give an honest, measured estimation of the amount of time the game makes them wait between turns. My whole point is that splitting the 1-3 hours you spend doing nothing over a large # of turns is deceptive.

Or are you asserting that spending anywhere from 33% to 50% of the time the game is open doing noting against your will is fine from a design standpoint? I'd frankly be amazed at such an assertion. The most important thing about a game is being able to play it, and for a significant % of time when civ V is open, you can't!

I don't want to hear about ways people have to compensate this tremendous flaw, I want to know how many people spend 2 hours per civ game doing nothing but staring at a screen or at the very least doing something other than playing it. Community resistance to this is alarming; what is the snag? I'm assuming most of you actually play the game. Even I do from time to time...
 
TheMeInTeam:

I just don't have a lot of aversion to staring at screen, I suppose. Or to multitasking. It's not like this flaw is unique to Civ V in the series, or even to Civ as a game. Lots of games ask you to not-play for long stretches of time, added together.
 
Ah, that explains it. Yeah, if you take enough cities (or just fight enough), you will get that and there's nothing you can do about it.

They don't really factor who starts wars enough; I find that whether or not I declare makes hardly any difference as to whether I'm a warmonger. Your case highlights this problem very well. Siam's train of thought was:
1. He never decs
2. He kicks ass in every war anyone starts with him
3. He could easily beat my army
4. Therefore: it's only a matter of time before he decs (ignoring #1)! Better surprise attack to have any hope!

Though to Firaxis they are probably seeing more as:
- There's no way I can win this game before he does, I should dec just to spite him.

No offence but this is actually pretty much all wrong, allow me to correct you as I might be able to shed some light on what's happening in this situation and in warmonger diplomacy in general.

All civs have a value assigned to them which is their modifier for how much it pisses them off when other civs act like warmongering menaces. There's a dice roll at the beginning of the game that can alter that value up or down by a max of 2.

There are only 2 things that accrue warmonger hate and they are declaring war and wiping out a civ. When you do one of these things you generate warmonger points with the other civs. Wiping out a civ generates twice as much warmonger penalty points as declaring war does. Taking cities doesn't generate any, unless it's the only city the civ has left. Just fighting in general also is not penalised.

The amount of warmonger points you've generated is adjusted for each civ using their own personal modifier to come up with an attitude value. Once this reaches above a certain threshold then they think of you as a menace. Some civs hate warmongers more than others and if I remember correctly Siam has the highest personal modifier of any civ in this regard.

So what's really happened in this situation is the player wiped out 2 civs, which is equal to DoWing 4 times and the civ most sensitive to that type of behaviour (Siam) became upset.

Those positive modifiers like 'we've traded recently' and 'we've fought against a common foe' were apparently all overcome by the two exterminations combined with Siam's flavour of hating that kind of behaviour.

DoF's provide the biggest counterweight to becoming labeled a warmongering menace. During a DoF you receive a large bonus which is subtracted from the final score that determines a civs attitude toward you so your DoF partners will take much longer to consider you a warmongering douche. This explains why sometimes a civ will be friendly as your pet dog one moment and then suddenly go hostile, denounce you and show a bunch of red negative modifiers in the diplo screen. It's because the DoF just expired and those bonus points are no longer being subtracted from your attitude score with that civ and you're now suddenly up above the hate threshold.
 
Okay so you can stop complaining about some actual numbers. Here's a save of my Arabian time victory game of agony. It's turn 468 in an epic game and I control the world in a nutshell. At war with china just to make it a little interesting and to deny city state victory for her.

Computer specs: (due to be upgraded later this year thankfully :))
AMD Athlon 4200+
2GB DDR 2 667 Bus speed
Nvidia 9600GT
OCZ Agility 3 AGT3-25SAT3-120G *
(* - speeds up Civ boot times by about 15-20 seconds even though CIV is on my mechanical drive).

Arabia time victory march : During war. (see attached save to run your own numbers if you wish).

To load main menu : 45 seconds
To load game : 5 minutes
To complete 1 turn during war (partial turn at that) : 3 min 15 seconds
To finish computer's turn : 1 minutes 15 seconds (80% of that was watching units taking damage)

Peacetime (5 turns later, all military units garrisoned / fortified).
To complete turn : 1 minute 15 seconds
To finish computer's turn : 45 seconds

Regardless, this is TURN BASED game, there is bound to be some downtime while the computer takes its TURN..,. ever play a board game? Yea there is a lot of time wasted 'doing nothing' in those also. How about chess? Unless you're playing rapid/blitz ect then there can be a lot of time 'doing nothing'. Commonly you're thinking about different strategies and options you could take in your upcoming turn. Once you've exhausted your time on thinking of what to do you begin to daydream and do other things. I play the game to relax after a hard day, not to add more stress by having to issue commands in rapid succession in order to optimize my play.

If you want Civ the RTS then there are other games that fit that game design model. Sure there is probably some bloat in the code that could cut down on turn times, but you can't ignore the nature of the game and expect magical speeds as the computer still has to crunch the numbers.

But overall computer games in general are 'a waste of time' and so what is the difference clicking and shooting or sitting and thinking. Not much in my opinion. One is a more fast paced waste of time, while the other is more kick back and relaxed waste of time.
 

Attachments

One thing each and every response I've seen to me here has in common is that nobody has actually timed their turns :lol:.

Because it's a silly point. Last turn before I logged out had a 27 second AI turn gap. But as I'd spent over 15 minutes in that turn, I think that the AI taking 2% of my time to make all of its moves isn't asking a lot.

I think you'll find the overwhelming majority of people, really don't mind.
 
TheMeInTeam:

I just don't have a lot of aversion to staring at screen, I suppose. Or to multitasking. It's not like this flaw is unique to Civ V in the series, or even to Civ as a game. Lots of games ask you to not-play for long stretches of time, added together.

Definitely not unique to the series or to civ, however you won't be finding many AAA titles that expect you to spend 2 hours out of 4 doing nothing. The issue here is the sheer amount of time Firaxis asks its players to not play.

To finish computer's turn : 45 seconds

Ouch! In a 300 turn game you're talking over 3 hours of nothing if that's your average...kind of helping my point.

Regardless, this is TURN BASED game, there is bound to be some downtime while the computer takes its TURN..,.

Computer runs off of scripts and algorithms. Care to explain how this can possibly take longer than the human?

How about chess? Unless you're playing rapid/blitz ect then there can be a lot of time 'doing nothing'.

Over the years, if there is ONE thing this board should have concluded, it's that civ =/= chess.

I play the game to relax after a hard day, not to add more stress by having to issue commands in rapid succession in order to optimize my play.

This gets away from the point. Maybe you do find 3 hours of doing nothing relaxing. It sounds that way on the surface, but when you're trying to PLAY something, it's frustrating.

But overall computer games in general are 'a waste of time' and so what is the difference clicking and shooting or sitting and thinking.

Not everyone needs 3 hours to sit and think about simple/memorized maneuvers. In fact, most people don't. The point of games is to PLAY them and HAVE FUN. The sole basis of your argument, as it stands, is that doing nothing is fun for you. That's great and all, but that doesn't defend a game purporting to be something else in actuality making you spend half your time doing nothing.

Because it's a silly point. Last turn before I logged out had a 27 second AI turn gap. But as I'd spent over 15 minutes in that turn

Again, the slower you play, the lower the % of time lost is on a game to game basis. However, you're still losing 2-3 hours per game in the absolute sense. That is not a silly point. You only get so many hours in a day or week, and most people wouldn't like throwing them away. What's silly is irrational defense of this game's most glaring remaining flaw and the resistance to even identifying it!
 
TheMeInTeam:

Definitely not unique to the series or to civ, however you won't be finding many AAA titles that expect you to spend 2 hours out of 4 doing nothing. The issue here is the sheer amount of time Firaxis asks its players to not play.

Your problem may be unique to you in that you generally speed-play Civ. I spend way more time tweaking my Civ than I do staring at the screen or doing nothing. I definitely spend a comparable amount of time walking from one point of interest to other points of interest in action-RPGs and the bigger JRPGs.

If you count the loading, the wait screens, and the walking, more than 3/4s of your time in Mass Effect was also spent doing nothing. Apparently, most gamers like doing nothing, since Mass Effect was both critically acclaimed and well-liked.
 
The scary bit is that if "TheMeInTeam's" argument were actually true, that we are doing "nothing" between turns, why just between turns? After all, at the end of the turn we push a button right? At the start of the next turn we push a button right? You define that during this time, we are doing nothing. But every button click we do during the turn even if it is less than a second, is still a sequence from one button push to the next. Therefore in that "1 second" we must also be doing nothing. Therefore if you argument is correct, then if you add up all the time between button pushes, you get the conclusion that we are doing nothing "99.99% of the time" and are only actually doing something for an infinitely short amount of time while we are actually pushing the button. If you visualize it, the line of "nothingness" is a flat line with instantly short periods of doing something.

Games are games. Whether the discussion is that we want games to be cheaper or to expend less time in "waiting", it is all dictated by supply and demand economics. They simply cannot run the turn times quicker on this technology for the level of quality we are demanding. Modders will come in and spend 1000's of hours modifying the SDK with their free time, to make the turn times a bit quicker. It still doesn't change the question of "doing nothing" as you have defined it.

Cheers
 
The scary bit is that if "TheMeInTeam's" argument were actually true, that we are doing "nothing" between turns, why just between turns? After all, at the end of the turn we push a button right? At the start of the next turn we push a button right? You define that during this time, we are doing nothing. But every button click we do during the turn even if it is less than a second, is still a sequence from one button push to the next. Therefore in that "1 second" we must also be doing nothing. Therefore if you argument is correct, then if you add up all the time between button pushes, you get the conclusion that we are doing nothing "99.99% of the time" and are only actually doing something for an infinitely short amount of time while we are actually pushing the button. If you visualize it, the line of "nothingness" is a flat line with instantly short periods of doing something.

Cute, but irrelevant. Everyone has different capabilities while playing, but the point is that their own capability be the limiting factor so they can have fun. The point is not to make the game painfully slower than their capability so that they want to give inputs but the game won't let them.

Strictly speaking, command lag DURING turns causes players to lose time too. For example, you order a unit to fortify and it does not do it (Civ IV forever, and civ V until some patches). You given an order, and it takes 2 seconds to execute, etc. Civ V is generally much less offensive in this sense, so I didn't point it out.

They simply cannot run the turn times quicker on this technology for the level of quality we are demanding

I've heard from more than one programmer that they can do it and that the code is just sloppy. That has been posted and confirmed by quite a few individuals on this very forum. Do you KNOW information to the contrary, or are you trying to make something up to support an argument that shouldn't even exist?

Your problem may be unique to you in that you generally speed-play Civ.

Wrong. The problem is more *noticeable* to me because I speed play civ. If given the same machine specs, you, I, santa claus, a 5 year old, and the king of the orcs would all lose the same amount of time waiting for the interface to allow additional commands. Whether it takes you 2 hours to finish a game or 20, you still lose 2 hours per game. For some, that might be 10% of their play time. For me, it's 50%. There are a few more people who can play at my speeds than you seem to think, I know several in fact.

I definitely spend a comparable amount of time walking from one point of interest to other points of interest in action-RPGs and the bigger JRPGs.

That's a horrible analogy and it breaks focus. Comparable situations to your RPG analogy in civ would be what you do during turns. Just as speed runners route plan, sequence break, etc so that they spend far less time moving between "points of interest", players with heuristics of fast thinking can reduce the amount of time spent playing civ V turns. That is also 100% irrelevant to the point.

How many of those action rpgs, jrpgs, or other games can you think of where over 1/5 of your time is spend where you can't give the game commands of any kind whatsoever? The ACTUAL COMPARABLE moments in these games are load times. There is a tvtrope for "loads of loading" for a reason. People don't like it. Ah! But firaxis pulled a number on us. They put loads of loading to EXTREME levels and sprinkled it in between turns in portions that are (usually but not always) less than one minute. This way, they can force us to watch a loading screen for hours and so few people seem to catch on.

To make the arguments you and glider1 put forth look as bad as they actually are, I'll draw up a fun analogy, complete with similarly apologist excuses! Let's say you're playing pokemon, except that NOW you have to spend 1 minute before EVERY SINGLE BATTLE in the game. There's no actual reason to make you wait 1 minute, but Nintendo decided they wanted to load in some cut scenes or animations and poorly coded that.

1. This is fine, I'm doing something else anyway! Pokemon is still great and 3+ hours of load times across a game is no problem at all! Surely nobody else should complain about this because I have a second nintendo or am browsing the internet every time I get into battle! Lul!
2. Nintendo has good economic sense, and therefore it is a good thing to sell a shoddy product to gamers. Reducing load times is SILLY.
3. Only fast players should care about the load times! Nobody else will mind! YOU shouldn't mind! Haha!
4. Doing nothing is player prerogative, so it is OK to FORCE players to do nothing.

What are the load times in mass effect? How many HOURS do you spend in mass effect on LOAD TIMES? Oops, you DON'T spend HOURS on load times in mass effect! Whooooooops! Or did you time it and can confirm that the game requires this? Does it require an hours of wait time for every 2 hours of game play? Does it?

No. It does not. If anything, you're proving my point further; good games don't FORCE the player into situations where they can't give inputs for extremely large chunks of the game. Mass effect received critical acclaim because it is a good game (though not perfect. Civ V received critical acclaim because...well...publications chose to indisputably lie to their consumers about the gameplay experience (I dare you to try to find a publisher that rated the game highly that actually called the game on its MANY release bugs, or the fact that MP didn't even work. As paid reviewers, you'd have thought they'd notice that core features didn't exist yet.....)

Anyway, all I'm seeing from the opposition is that:

1. Civ V does in fact force players to do nothing for longer than any AAA title mentioned yet
2. People who are annoyed by doing nothing for 2 hours/game against their will are supposed to be fine with that "because they can do other things, because they themselves aren't optimized, or because other games probably do this too even though we can't give any examples"

That's it. That's all the opposition has to answer for the FACT that this game yanks 2+ hours of time away from everyone who plays it each time they run through a game, where they LITERALLY CAN'T PLAY IT. Yes, civ IV was an offender also, and it sucked then too. Now, it's even worse, and all people are doing is making excuses for it! Let me emphasize one last point:

Therefore if you argument is correct, then if you add up all the time between button pushes, you get the conclusion that we are doing nothing "99.99% of the time" and are only actually doing something for an infinitely short amount of time while we are actually pushing the button.

There are players out there who can spend nearly 0 time between actions. Do you know who these players are?

THE AIs

A simple calculator can pull arithmetic at thousands of times the speed that people can. Computers can do calculations or follow algorithms at speeds human beings can't even perceive. Why, then, can the computer not even manage to go 5 times as fast as me in civ? I'm not a superhuman. I'm not a genius. I'm above average in a few categories that let me play the game quickly, but there is NO REASON that should be insurmountable to a computer.

What calculations is it doing? Are we seeing some fine top-level grandmaster tactics brewing :lol:? Is the GAME ENGINE lagging the units so much that it bogs the game down and the AI can't move them? Is it still refusing to cache things that can't possibly have changed? What is it? According to you, the AI should be the ONE THING that DOESN'T waste time during a game, and yet I'm somehow capable of dragging the game along so much that it actually can't do its movements a mere few times faster than me! What gives?

Who am I supposed to listen to? Several on and off-forum programmers that insist this is a shoddy product in this regard, or apologists who are fine with it because it's called civ? I apologize if that question sounds biased, but so is the assertion that the problem is "unique to me". Given the state that the game was in on release, claiming making between-turn times reasonable is somehow impossible seems.............off. Firaxis opted to insult its players by making them lose 2 hours/game continually while addressing a myriad of other things. Why?

You know what my favorite thing is? I can see how much time I lose. I can compare my session start time to session finish time on the clock, and then the game tells me that I spent less than HALF that time playing (IE 4 hours pass, game says it took me 90 minutes to finish). I could pull that in civ IV mind you and V is WORSE. My 33% to 50% estimate is CONSERVATIVE and meant for other players out there. But, apparently it's true, people like watching paint dry but get offended when you point out that's what they're doing...
 
The coding challenges associated with coordinating and moving units in a 1UPT environment, especially when taking in tactical considerations of battle, and especially for randomly-generated maps with a large variety of possible game setup options, are formidable. Then of course there's the rest of the AI stuff like apparently-meaningful diplomacy, managing an economy (with entirely new mechanics to previous games) and adopting a grand strategy etc.

Computationally this is a difficult problem, to the point where even the best AI experts in the business aren't going to be able to write AI code that isn't at least a bit of a hassle to players due to turn times. Look how many years it's taken for AI experts to write programs that can hope to beat competent Chess players, and Chess is a game that is many orders of magnitude simpler to program for than Civ.

Just look at the embarrassment several months ago when it was discovered a large component of the slowdown between turns was roughly proportional to the number of workers in the game. Mods were suggested and created that limited the number of workers buidable for each civ to 1. Unfortunately I think this points to a lack of necessary talent among Civ5's AI programmers (although I've no doubt they're still very talented people!) to handle the quality expectations of players for this game. I think the worker thing was a bug in the end, but that was in there at release and the mind boggles at how many hours of gamers' time and kWh of energy have been wasted due to such a bug.

This is why I advocate for the core source code release asap. There's no shame in letting the unpaid experts (I'm sure glider1 is one such guy!) find and fix your mistakes. In the end those fixes can be incorporated into official patches and everyone (especially the end-gamer) wins.

So to summarise, the coding challenges for civ5 are significant (arguably much more significant than for previous civ games), the talent pool at Firaxis is likely not sufficient for that challenge, and so that pool should be extended to modders by releasing the core source. Honestly I don't expect to see anything by way of improving turn times until Firaxis make themselves more accountable for the code they've written.
 
TheMeInTeam:

You seem to be beyond the point of reason on this, so one last input from me.

It doesn't matter whether or not the game allows you to input commands, when those commands are nonessential busywork. That's still nothing, even though it's technically not.

And yes, Mass Effect does have hours of this "nothing" for every 2 hours of actual game content played. The elevator between floors of a single location you visit can take more than minute of waiting.

In fact, ME is worse because I can't surf while I'm directing Shepard to navigate empty space I've seen a gazillions times en route to the next location of interest.
 
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