Turn processing times

[demidyad]

10 sec turn time too long..... How many of you complaining ever play Chess? Or how about the Tactics and Strategy board games like D-Day or even BlitzKrieg or Stalingrad? Anyone? Anyone under 30? ........Long pause.......Didn't think so.

Er, what? I'm the OP and I'm an avid Go player. And I'm 28. So what was your point...?

Waiting around for a long time without any input is very different when you're playing an immersive single-player experience like Civ, than when you're playing a relatively abstract tabletop game against another person. They're different experiences.

 

[Ryika]

If you're playing chess or something you can also use that time to plan ahead, think about what the opponent is thinking, try to make sure you're not missing anything. It would be a waste to sit there, "doing nothing".

In Civ on the other hand it's mostly just dead time, because it makes a lot more sense to just wait until it's your turn again, then take your time and plan ahead with all the information, and a properly working interface, not the limited between-turns functionality.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

You are aware that CiV was still using a 32bit engine right? So a direct comparison to VI using a 64bit is skewed at best. Give us Civ IV Modders a 64 bit engine and we will make 5 and 6 play and look like toddler games. Here honey play with my iphone version of civ, says daddy or mommy to the 3yr old.

10 sec turn time too long..... How many of you complaining ever play Chess? Or how about the Tactics and Strategy board games like D-Day or even BlitzKrieg or Stalingrad? Anyone? Anyone under 30? ........Long pause.......Didn't think so.

JosEPh

Since you're bringing up age, as someone over 30 (almost 33 now), I can safely say that arguments pulling in chess tend to be used in lieu of actual topic-related arguments. After all, I've seen such "arguments" used in an amazing swath of contexts and topics, with similar relevance and utility each time.

10 second times in early game, based on track record, suggests turn times a few times larger later on. As a result, for a full playthrough you will spend 60-120 minutes on waiting for turns.

As Ryika points out, the incomplete information and even more limited than usual UI make utilizing this dead time for something productive in-game problematic. If you're the type of player that can win on high levels in 4 hours or less, a 2 hour wait period per game means that roughly 1/3 of your entire "playing time" is waiting.

That is egregiously different from how the numbers work out for most other games. Our best hope is that putting the beta out of debug mode and not save-spamming stuff will help, especially if the shown videos are not being run on SSD.

 

[wayneb64]

The only problem with turn times I have ever had in Civ V was due to planes attacking subs. I play with enemy animations on and the quick planes mod and on small maps. No way I am spending 60-120 minutes per game waiting even with enemy animations on. Maybe if I was at war every turn of the game it might get close to an hour, but that rarely happens. Only the end game slows down due to the extreme size of the AIs at that point.

 

[civvver]

I can load up the game a save and turn time at t200 and chrono it if you want some benchmarks. Will be a bit more useful than everyone throwing random numbers.

Loading the game (from directX selection to in game menu, with EUI installed (skips intro videos)) : 41.86s
Loading a end game save on turn 211 (standard size) : 32.50s
Turn process at 211 (all AI alive, deity level, all animations off) : 16.26s with 4 diplo screen pop ups in it (the useless ones should be removed from the game really...).

No wonder I'm somewhat surprised when people have so much problems with civ5 turn times :| Game runs on a SSD and a i5 2500K.

I have a normal 7200 rpm hard drive which is probably the issue, but even still, a ssd shouldn't be required to play a freakin pc game that's 6 years old. At the time civ5 came out a 64gb ssd was several hundred dollars. My rig is old but still plenty capable, an i5-760, 16gb ram, r9-270 (gpu has been upgraded). I play witcher 3 and dragon age origins on this without issues, it's only this 6 year old game civ5 that is so frustrating performance wise.

I haven't upgraded my ssd now cus I just don't like messing with reinstalling my os and moving all my files around, ie I'm lazy, and other games have no problems loading. I think civ5 loads too many assets immediately or something instead of just loading what you need to play.

I will benchmark it for you and post my answers. And by benchmark I mean launch the program from steam and hit go on my iphone stop watch. I'll do launch time to main menu, time from hitting go to starting a new game, and time to load one of my old saves.

 

[Acken]

Well ssd only impacts load times. So no it is not required to play the game.

However an i5 2500 is approximately as old as the game. But if youre playing on a laptop cpus are know to run slower than an overclocked desktop.

Edit ok you re on a desktop so im curious how long turn times take even if your cpu is somewhat old. Of course you have to play with the same settings to compare... standard size and animations off.
Also whether or not you can run more 3d heavy games is irrelevant since turn time is 100% cpu related and loading is anout your hdd or ssd. On the other hand to be honest civ5 is crap in fps performance. Its ugly and runs at like 50fps.

 

[civvver]

i5-2500 came out like 6 months after civ5, I know cus I built a new pc specifically for civ5 (my pc was getting old and many games were sluggish, but civ5 was the first game that literally wouldn't run at all) and was debating whether to go with the lga 1156 or wait for sandybridge. It was released early 2011, while I built my pc in fall 2010. In the end I stuck with the 760 cus it was cheaper and overclocked very nicely.

I'm actually kind of shocked how well it's held up. I had a gtx460 and it died on me a couple years ago, but it was starting to show its age then and now way would it run stuff like dragon age origins now above 30 fps. So one gpu upgrade, a ram expansion and my cpu has held up fine, it's quite amazing.

 

[demidyad]

Did anyone that watched the livestream have any thoughts on the turn times? They said it was a very recent build. I wasn't watching closely, I could only have it playing in the background, but they seemed a little better to me? Hard for me to tell, though.

 

[Balkans]

I guess they have all kind of different tools turned on under the hood. That completely changes turn times. But i was kinda shocked yesterday, i checked the stream for 5-10 minutes, and around turn 60, Ed pressed next turn, and i swear to God, it took like 20 seconds to compute it...
Honestly, i don't think it will be worse turn times than previous civ games, but i am 100% sure it won't be overwhelmingly better.

 

[ProMeTheus112]

it seemed a little better at first, then over 10 seconds ~2 cities, then close to 20seconds later

it's not looking good right now, we'll see how it is in the end, but I don't expect it to get a ton better

it's a big deal imo cause I think a lot of people don't want to waste time, many will stop playing because of this and that includes me

as it looks now it's few then 5 then 10 then 20sec in the early game (turn 70, 3 towns or so), probably a minute at least in the end game if not (much?) more. I think I'd call that unplayable (and no I don't think it's comparable to chess, you can think while you manage things in Civ which there are many to manage and limited UI while waiting for turn and a game lasts a really long time and number of turns, also of course some info comes up when it is your turn which you then base your thinking on which you can't do while you wait). So you can't finish the game in good conditions, so if it stays like this I'm really not sure I'm gonna play much more than a few games unfortunately (a dozen?), even though the game looks really good, I love the game.

Still hoping it improves or that the late game isn't that bad but I don't want to have blind expectation for this, there is not much time left and if performance has not been planned well it won't become good.

The argument for tools running I can hear, but I don't know if there is really that much, these are press release, I think the top priority is to show the game in the best possible state as they currently can. And the animations turned off, it'll help but clearly even when there are no animations being displayed turns still take long to process so that won't really make it good either it seems.

How much more waiting time will we get in a mid/endgame with many cities, players and a larger map?

How much room is there really for improving this before launch ?

Notice there has been no word about this from the developpers which is not a good sign for it to improve much (they may not have a plan for it).

Something I would find acceptable is in the area of 30 seconds waiting time in the end game ? And/or if you can have a fully functional UI while the turn is processed. Ideal is less than 10 seconds I guess, but is that impossible ? I hope they make the game efficient, the impact on fun is big!

 

[ProMeTheus112]

but it seems like many people just don't mind waiting a minute or more in the end game? it is still fun for you?

 

[ProMeTheus112]

Ah, ok. Will see then. I have some bad memories of tedious endgames that made me stop playing quickly. But since the quality of the game overall here seems really good... there may be genuinely interesting things to do in the game while waiting for your turn, then that can be okay to keep me playing.

 

[Acken]

Fully functional UI would be a minimum if turn times are really long. Either way we ll see in the final version with animations off and on our computers.

 

[olduser]

There is a trick to speed up the turn times in Civ4 and 5. It requires a small modification inside the gamecore dll.

Normally during the turn processing after every AI players turn the whole graphical output is refreshed. It's possible to skip the unnecessary redrawing and only do it once. This does alot in Civ5 because all the Citystates are players as well.


In case of Civ6 wait until it's released to see how the turn times are it's too early to tell right now. And i wouldn't mind longer turns if the processing time is well spend on things like a better AI for example.

 

[civvver]

It wasn't as bad as I remembered, but this is my first time loading it on win10 so I do wonder if it helped.

Time from direct x screen to menu was 1 minute 20 seconds. Time to load a huge map turn 300 something was 1 minute 45 seconds. Turn time was still pretty bad though, 50 seconds for a single turn.

Still it feels like a lot of waiting around so hopefully 6 is better.

 

[Nikae]

When people have claimed civ 5 has had "really quick" times, when actually timing it they have found that in actuality they still spend hours per game between turns on standard maps.

What is the average amount of time you spend between turns in the mid-late game on standard and huge maps, with animations off? Are you getting 10 seconds or less?

I will estimate that you are not.

I will buy the excuses for civ 6 running slow now when I see evidence that the game can run fast. Absent that evidence, I'll go ahead and stick with a track record that doesn't care about turn times or UI as the anticipated outcome.

Large map, information era, quick movement, quick combat, 2 ongoing wars, difficulty 6 - if it matters, graphics settings all minimum is 5 seconds.

Same with graphics all set to maximum is 7 seconds. This is the setting I play on.

Same without quick move and combat is 55 seconds.

The difference between scenario 1 and 3 is eleven times the difference. Quick combat and quick movement is a must.

Running on PC with an AMD FX-8370 8-core 4Ghz, 8 GB ram, 7200 rpm speed hd, gfx card if matters is an Asus r9 290x. I have no idea what the Intel equivalent would be, never had one.

Edit: OS is Win7 x64.

 

[Tatran]

Quick combat and quick movement is a must.

And 'Quick Selection Advance'.

Btw, with allmost the same game settings but on a very old system (duo core, 3 GHz + Windows XP),
turn times in normal view are 30-40 seconds and in strategic view 15-20 seconds, late/end game. Default program settings -> everything minimum or low + quick.

 

[master__jj]

i5-2500 came out like 6 months after civ5, I know cus I built a new pc specifically for civ5 (my pc was getting old and many games were sluggish, but civ5 was the first game that literally wouldn't run at all) and was debating whether to go with the lga 1156 or wait for sandybridge. It was released early 2011, while I built my pc in fall 2010. In the end I stuck with the 760 cus it was cheaper and overclocked very nicely.

I'm actually kind of shocked how well it's held up. I had a gtx460 and it died on me a couple years ago, but it was starting to show its age then and now way would it run stuff like dragon age origins now above 30 fps. So one gpu upgrade, a ram expansion and my cpu has held up fine, it's quite amazing.

that's very interesting. I had a Phenom II X6 1090T and replaced the processor (and mobo off course) with a recent i5. Shockingly, my system scored better on the benchmarks with the X6 -and I bought that one in 2009. Even when playing Civ 5 with the new i5, I noticed it loaded a bit SLOWER.

 

[demidyad]

Bumping this, anyone have any thoughts after the explosion of recent videos? Have any streamers mentioned anything about the turn times?

 

[Siptah]

I've only seen one late game LP. That was the cultural victory of GameCrate (?). Turn times seemed ok, less than 20 seconds after clicking on 'next turn' he could play again.