Question for BE players : 'Please Wait' still so long?

[Sherlock]

I have a smoking PC and yet CiV still takes a LONG FREAKING TIME to complete turns after about 1500 AD.

Is BE any better at this?

 

[Lucius_]

Maybe turn times would be quicker if your PC wasn't on fire?

Seriously though, not really. I think BE turn times are a bit faster than V, but that could easily be my imagination.

 

[Sherlock]

Maybe turn times would be quicker if your PC wasn't on fire?

Seriously though, not really. I think BE turn times are a bit faster than V, but that could easily be my imagination.

That's very disappointing. I guess this really is a re-skin.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Turn times are a lot faster for me, but waiting for the patch is taking pretty long.

 

[Gort]

That's very disappointing. I guess this really is a re-skin.

It's the same engine. On a related note, SSDs are awesome.

 

[Anomandaris]

Probably not useful to you but if you enable quick combat (i.e. no animations), turns go much faster and at least for me and extremely short. If you mean actions needed to make good of your turn (and not the AI move calculations), yes, the longer the game gets, the longer your actions per turn which gets really tedious towards the end.

edit: SSDs are indeed awesome.

 

[Nikolai II]

My 3 year old machine runs both Civ5 and BE well, also in the late game. As Gort says, SSDs are awesome.

 

[oakdragon]

Does Civ really use the hard drive enough for an SSD to make a significant difference?

 

[Risch]

Disabling movement and battle animations speeds up the game the most. It was a mind-blowing moment for me when someone told me that the game animates *all* the animations in the game, even those covered by unexplored territory and the fog of war.

 

[Xenotitan]

The game certainly doesn't animate ALL the animations covered by the fog of war. Turns would take a lot longer than they do now when AIs went to war.

 

[Lord Yanaek]

Something that speeds up BE turns : less factions on the map (unless you add more in advanced setup) and City States (Stations in BE) have no troops at all to manage. Aliens can be more numerous thought.

Other than that the engine is almost the same. They replaced the Lua implementation used in Civ with a new one called "Havock" that's said to be optimized for games so it might make a small difference.

I still wish they would put a real quick combat thing rather than an instant combat.

 

[primordial stew]

Disabling movement and battle animations speeds up the game the most. It was a mind-blowing moment for me when someone told me that the game animates *all* the animations in the game, even those covered by unexplored territory and the fog of war.

Indeed, with movement animation adding the most lag (AI seems to have to move every unit every turn, some sort of 1UPT workaround to avoid deadlock?) . The really stupid thing is that it doesn't pan to the ones you can't see, yet it still animates them One would think pan is before draw, but apparently no.

 

[Lord Yanaek]

Well, are you sure it's how it works? I seriously doubt the engine will animate hidden moves/combat and just because "someone" told you doesn't make it true.

Did someone actually test this? Saving just before ending turn, measuring the time it takes to process the turn, loading the save, revealing the whole map with firetuner and measuring the time it takes to process again with all map visible and animations processed?

 

[Anomandaris]

I have not tested it in such a way, no. However, the difference in time it takes the AI to complete a turn (for a faction) with and without animations is huge. Too big to be attributed just to the units you can see (in my games, at least). Even a faction on the other side of the world that I have not scouted at all takes longer to process a turn when the animations are enabled.

 

[oakdragon]

If all animations are really are calculated or animated or whatever, even the ones you can't see, that would be a really dumb blunder from a programming point of view. I find it hard to believe that's the true explanation.

 

[Anomandaris]

Have you seen the endlessly repeating jet attack animation? Obviously all is not well in that department and I wouldn't be surprised if resources are wasted on calculating invisible animations. Then again, I might be wrong. It just seems suspicious to me that disabling the animations sped up the AI turns by at least a factor of 5 regardless of whether or not I can see the animations.

 

[Manannan]

My PC is about 5 years old aside from the GPU which is about 3 years old (I think anyway, details are fuzzy), and while turn times could really drag in CiV I feel like they're a lot quicker in BE. I think it's a result of there being no city-states, the AI being less likely to spam carpets of doom, the aliens frequently falling to xenocide by the time the late game rolls around, and general optimization. Actually I feel like the game runs a lot smoother than CiV in general on my rig, but your mileage may vary.

 

[Light Cleric]

Does Civ really use the hard drive enough for an SSD to make a significant difference?

It apparently does. I've had people ask me what my specs are in my LPs before because my turns go so much faster but I built this thing over 3 1/2 years ago and the only upgrades its had are RAM and an SSD so it's not really that up to date. I would have to do an actual test of the times in identical circumstances, though. I do remember noticing things going faster when I switched over.

I don't normally put games on my SSD because I want to save writes but I made an exception since it was a significant boost.

 

[Xenotitan]

Have you seen the endlessly repeating jet attack animation? Obviously all is not well in that department and I wouldn't be surprised if resources are wasted on calculating invisible animations. Then again, I might be wrong. It just seems suspicious to me that disabling the animations sped up the AI turns by at least a factor of 5 regardless of whether or not I can see the animations.

I don't see this speed up at all during turn times for the AI I can't see.

 

[Lucius_]

How long is most people's AI's turns? Personally, a single faction takes usually about 2 seconds per faction with misc and aliens taking a bit longer. Yeah it would be nice if it was under 10 seconds between turns but are people really complaining about 30 second waits?

Tomorrow I'm going to actually time this stuff because imo, time between turns isn't excessive. It wasn't in CiV either. Like I said in my first post maybe a little quicker in BE, but I've never timed it.

I'm curious what the OP has in his smokin computer and how long his times are.