Slowdown: It's the workers (with link to ugly fix)

[EmpireOfCats]

For some reason, we're still seeing people here in this forum talking about the massive, crippling slowdown as if the reason wasn't known (apologies to those who do, you can skip the rest of this post). In fact, we have empirical evidence that it is the workers who are causing the problems:

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=94139

Those damn peasants! There is also a (really, really ugly) hack to get around it:

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=94687

That's a bit too aggressive for my blood. In addition, there seems to be a line-of-sight bug that might be part of the problem, because it causes more work for the AI:

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=93309

The good news is that the list of fixes coming out "as soon as next week" includes at least one patch for the worker problem. There is hope for us "huge" players yet.

 

[Tomice]

Thx for the info! The guy who found it is a damn smart person, Sherlock Holmes style! Glad there are such people in the community!

 

[lynxxyarly]

i always suspected it was the workers. I did a 1v1 game with a friend and we played 2 games and one was with a lot of workers and the other we built excessive workers.

Guess which game started to bog down the fastest?

 

[Alphard]

From the bug description it seemed that worker actions were recalculated for every worker.. (processing went up as there were more workers). This seems pretty silly as the building options are more or less the same for all the workers. The prioritization should be only done once and then the actions divided among available workers by proximity to the tile that needs improvements.


Right now it seems to be:
Loop through workers and for each of them
- Process all tiles looking for the most important improvement

Should be:
Process all tiles, queue them in order of importance
Loop through workers and for each of them
- Find the highest importance task in the task queue in close proximity to the worker


I find it hard to believe actually that they would have created the 1st type of logic, but i see no other reason for the turn slowdown in case of lots of workers.

 

[adecoy95]

workers are never idle, military units mostly are when not at war

 

[Officerjackboot]

2k needs to cut that guy a check because he figured it out alright. The fix is not very good of course but cheers to him for coming up with it.

 

[Krall]

2k needs to cut that guy a check because he figured it out alright. The fix is not very good of course but cheers to him for coming up with it.

Yeah, here's hoping we get our workers stack of doom back! Able to build mines in 1/15th of a turn, rip down forests in 2 turns and sit back drinking Corona's for the rest of the game while in sentry mode

 

[Valdyr]

I wonder why this problem only seems to happen some of the time. It feels like my current game on a Huge Earth map (vanilla version) has a lot slower turn times than the Yet Another Huge Earth Map (mod map) which is the same size. Is it just my imagination? I'm having a lot of fun with my current game but it's pretty agonizing when turn times are almost 2 full minutes in the late 1800's when I vastly exceed the recommended PC specs for the game.

 

[engelthefallen]

Hum, this makes a lot of sense. I was just playing a game even on a small map and near end game I ended up with a hoard of workers and the game slowed down to a crippling halt with only two civs left on the map. Seemed the larger I expanded, and the more workers I had, the slower the game went.

 

[alvan]

Hm, only run with 1 worker

Also what happens if a worker (or settler) gets captured, it disappears?

 

[HeavyTwenty]

Thx for the info! The guy who found it is a damn smart person, Sherlock Holmes style! Glad there are such people in the community!

They should hire that guy for their internal bug testing team.

 

[EmpireOfCats]

Also what happens if a worker (or settler) gets captured, it disappears?

Somewhere in the thread that was discussed, but I don't remember the details and am simply to lazy to check. At this point, it makes more sense IMHO to just wait for the patch next week and see how the game works then.

 

[MisterBarca]

Somewhere in the thread that was discussed, but I don't remember the details and am simply to lazy to check. At this point, it makes more sense IMHO to just wait for the patch next week and see how the game works then.

Don't get your hopes up.

2k Greg already posted a while ago and said that the upcoming worker change has virtually no effect on the slowdown.

 

[EmpireOfCats]

2k Greg already posted a while ago and said that the upcoming worker change has virtually no effect on the slowdown.

Sigh. They need to do something, because at the current slowness, the game is dead in the water. If I can't play the huge map, I can't play the game.

 

[Doctor Phibes]

What a ridiculous waste of processor time. Abolish workers entirely, I say, they add nothing to the game. Just implement CTP's Public Works system - but of course that probably means using sliders, which seem to be forbidden.

 

[Tylerryan79]

In the post for the fix, scroll down and read kruelgor's post. Has anyone else noticed when they alt-tab out of the game they see a still of the starting video? This happened to me all the time(I've since turned the start vid off), and was exactly like he mentions.

 

[Kinseek]

Hm, only run with 1 worker

Also what happens if a worker (or settler) gets captured, it disappears?

The one who captures it gets to have more then one - and the one who lost it gets to build a new one.

There is also a worldwide cap of 60 where if it is reached no one can build new workers, even if they have none.

workers are never idle, military units mostly are when not at war

Weirdly enough the test was done with the AI in war-mode against the player, which should mean alot of calculations on where to move all those military units. But even then it was blazing compared to testing it with workers.

 

[Ktulu]

The more I play CIV V the more I realize that the concept of workers as a unit is unnecessary.

Workers do two things: build tile improvements and trade networks(roads).

Since tile improvements can only be made inside your cultural borders (ie city radius) why can't their just be a mechanic where you buy/produce tile improvements from within the city screen?

And since their is no longer a need for road spam, why can't there be a mechanic which builds a road/railroad between two cities. Why the need to build and send a worker unit? You could even have a trade network screen that looks like the strat view, but allows you to build roads from point A to B using gold or hammers. Click A then click B, the game then tells you how much it will cost and how long it will take and you click BUILD.

The worker just feels like a unit that exists because it's always been a part of Civ. Having a bunch of workers sitting around doing nothing other than bog down the game is a tiresome concept.

 

[Wardancing]

The worker just feels like a unit that exists because it's always been a part of Civ.

I dont recall workers being in Civ1, iirc, settlers made improvements and built roads.

 

[Strategy Master]

I dont recall workers being in Civ1, iirc, settlers made improvements and built roads.

And civ 2. Workers were first introduced in civ3.