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

[sovarn]

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

That was the same in civ2. Also the concept of buying tile improvements was implemented was tried in Call to Power. Your civ generated public works and you can spend them to make improvements. Can't remember how well the community liked this.

But it would probably fit in with the ciV theme where money can buy anything. Although implementing this for the AI would be troublesome.

 

[serikas]

Does anyone remember that test play live broadcast before the ciV release?

I can't remember who said it (2k Greg?) but someone mentioned that there was one guy who was assigned to only work on the worker automation AI throughout the whole ciV development. And workers are building farms, then build trade posts on the farms, then build farms again, on and on, and cause the whole game to slow down.



Maybe this is another proof that ciV team didn't really work on computer games but worked on pen and paper board games..

 

[Hail]

[...]
I can't remember who said it (2k Greg?) but someone mentioned that there was one guy who was assigned to only work on the worker automation AI throughout the whole ciV development.
[...]

it's just... he has not finished yet!

 

[Alphard]

The thing I like about the workers is that you can steal them from other players.. and you also need to guard them.

Lousy implementation is no reason to cut the feature completely.

 

[Pantastic]

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?

Civilization: Call to Power did this, you set a slider to put part of your hammers or gold (forget which) to a pool for improvements, then built them without a settler. I also would like to see something like that instead of worker units, but they seem attached to workers. I also don't know if there's any bad blood about CTP, since it was released by Activision - IIRC Avalon Hill also had a claim on the name "Civilization" from their board game, and Activision licensed the name from them, or something along those lines.

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

In Civ1 and 2 Settlers did the job of workers and settlers. Technically there wasn't a worker unit, but there were noncombat guys who you moved around to build improvements just like workers now, the only difference was that they could also found cities.

 

[AlpsStranger]

This is interesting. I was not aware that this was the root cause of the slowdown. Not a very good fix, but *excellent* detective work.

 

[pagh80]

Call to Power never got the critics and popularity that the game deserved.
On several areas it was well ahead of the current civ games and had some brilliant ideas at the time.
Public works was one of them. Take a percentage of your empirewide hammers and use them to buy improvements. These improvements still took some turns to make but this time you didnt have to micro your workers. The gameplay became smoother cause of it.
Another brilliant idea was that you could make the improvements stronger later on when you unlocked certain techs. This way a farm could be improved i think 3 times during the game to become a super farm later. It was fun and created some new strategies, you had to be aware of.
Mass city management was good also.
You could save buildqueues and assign these to 1 or multiple cities. All it took was a few clicks. It was quite brilliant. In 3 clicks you could give 20 cities a buildqueue to work on.(maybe that first came in CtP2 i cant remember)
They introduced borders also i believe, but the AI could still enter them without declaring war. It showed though that they were close to the modern way of handling it like in Civ IV and V.
Making small armies of up to 3 units which worked together as one strong unit. This gave some interresting combat options. It has defiently potential if implemented correctly.

 

[Bhoy]

I can remember when I first played Civ3 I thought to myself "what to hell, this is not as good as CTP2, why did they ignore all the obviously great strides that game made?"

The biggest problem with CTP2, if my memory serves me correctly, was the stupid AI. Was just too easy to beat em even at the hardest level. I remember thinking that Civ 3 would be CTP2 with just much better AI. Unfortunately it wasn't.

Civ5 is a throw back to how I felt when I first tried Civ3, only I'm more disappointed with Civ5 because I thought that they were going to give me a better version of Civ 4 (fixed the combat, give us cool hexes and make the AI more intelligent).

They've managed to deliver a much worse game than Civ4 BTS, with only the cool hexes being achieved from the above list.

 

[Jharii]

They must all belong to unions.

 

[Ronin228]

I have been giving this game a chance before I posted a negative thread about it. I was very excited about Civ5 being released, as I enjoyed both Civ3 & Civ4 prior to this. I'm nearing the end of a game and its' about 1980AD. For the past 100 years or so, the turns and load times have been incredibly slow, I haven't experience such slowness in games since the 80's when I tried playing games off a tape drive into a Timex Sinclare computer lol

Last night I had a few beers, put the family to bed, and was looking forward to a little Civ5 action... well within two turns I had passed out in my officer chair waiting for the next turn to load. This is unacceptable and I can't play the game like this. I don't have much time to game and I don't want to spend half of it staring a the circling globe cursor

I have a decent rig, not top of the line but it should be able to run this game... it's an Intel Q6600 (OC'd to 3.2ghz), Radeon 5870 video, 4gb ram... is there anything I'm missing that would help with load & turn times???

Moderator Action: Merged threads, hopefully you'll find your answer here.

 

[Lonkut]

It was found that workers make the game slow down. Theres a thread here on how to fix it by limiting the workers per civ http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=391922. Also, it seems that you need some super comp to play the game.

 

[Fariic]

I managed to figure out what mods was causing slow down for me( RED) in particilar. One I stopped using certain mods I havent had trouble. Turn times could be better.

I'm playing a huge earth, marathon, and the world is covered.
I have a quad core processor, 64 bit vista, and 8 gigs of ram. Turns are about 30 seconds.

 

[Afforess]

I don't get why workers are the slowdown though. Shouldn't the code be really simple.

Psuedocode:

If Plot does not have trading post
build trading post
Loop

What am I missing here?

 

[Wardancing]

I don't get why workers are the slowdown though. Shouldn't the code be really simple.

Psuedocode:

If Plot does not have trading post
build trading post
Loop

What am I missing here?

From my brief demo runs, but mainly reading these forums, i would think the code would look more like this:

Psuedocode:

01 If Plot does not have trading post
02 calculate path to get to plot
03 if path obstructed stop and contemplate life
04 goto 02
05 if unit on plot goto 03
06 build trading post
07 Loop

i think the lag is probably some infinate loops of 02 through 05

 

[CarloTheCurious]

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.

Use all those 5-minute breaks to get some RL stuff done!

 

[Afforess]

From my brief demo runs, but mainly reading these forums, i would think the code would look more like this:

Psuedocode:

01 If Plot does not have trading post
02 calculate path to get to plot
03 if path obstructed stop and contemplate life
04 goto 02
05 if unit on plot goto 03
06 build trading post
07 Loop

i think the lag is probably some infinate loops of 02 through 05

By gods, you've found it! The game is forcing workers to calculate the meaning of life each time (42).

 

[Ktulu]

Another thing that might be contributing to slowdowns is the unnecessary unit movements by the AI, especially city states. Every time the "camera" is on AI territory I always see units moving around within their borders. Why? Where are they going? Are they moving just for the sake of moving?

For most of the game my units are stationary, the only time my military is moving within my own borders is when I'm actively at war or when the unit is initially built and needs to go somewhere.

 

[EmpireOfCats]

Use all those 5-minute breaks to get some RL stuff done!

Actually, in the beginning, I was doing sit-ups. No, seriously. However, somehow, I just couldn't keep up after a while .