whats the optimal hardware for a huge map?

[DrunkenRine]

hi there!

until now i only played civ 5 on small, 7 civ maps because i dont have too much time and money to invest into my hardware atm. but if i wanted to play a huge map with lets say 20 civs and city states, what is the most importand resource that the game needs from your hardware? do i need a lot of ram? the most annoying part in later stage games are the huge loading times between the turns. what do you guys recommend for a flawless and smooth experience on really big maps, where you can advance to turn 400 and still click next turn and be able to continue playing right after you clicked, without waiting?

 

[drac313]

The game's poor coding is what makes it slow. However, the game relies heavily on the CPU rather than the GPU. Getting a quad core i5 or i7 processor with 8GB of RAM and a good Video card would be the optimal build.

 

[DrunkenRine]

thanks for the tip. i guess it isnt so expensive to get the optimal hardware for a game which is almost 3 years old, is it.

 

[buchengshi]

For turn times, it all comes down to clock speed. The calculations doe for the AI are single-threaded. So the faster the CPU, the better. Overclocking works wonders. You want at least a quad-core for helping with the load from DX11.

You'll also want the best GPU you can get. Civ5 + maxed video settings + huge map = lots of memory usage. At the minimum a card with 2GB of VRAM, but more would be better*. But it's not just the memory, you also want powerful. There's no such thing as too powerful when playing huge maps.

I love huge maps, but playing on them wasn't always an option (without it becoming painful in the late game). My system at launch was an i7-920 OCd to 3 GHz and a GTX 285. The 285 got upgraded to a 3GB GTX 580, then two of them. Next came an i7-3930 OCd to 4.2 GHz. Most recent was replacing the 580s with two 4GB GTX 680s. Each upgrade made a noticeable difference in performance. On a side note, this game is incredible in 3D.

* See attached SS.

 

[FeiLing]

what do you guys recommend for a flawless and smooth experience on really big maps, where you can advance to turn 400 and still click next turn and be able to continue playing right after you clicked, without waiting?

a time machine

/scnr

 

[Syntax Error]

Standard maps still keep me entertained, but am looking forward to the day I get to play extra huge games with max civs and CSes.

 

[joncnunn]

If the main thing that's bothering you is the time the AI takes during the turns after a certain point; you can significantly improve simply by turning on strategic view at the end of the turn; (showing moves is much faster in strategic mode)

 

[Gamewizard]

Or if you are playing in normal view, turn off all animations. This is also a BIG time saver.

 

[Carl5872]

The game's poor coding is what makes it slow. However, the game relies heavily on the CPU rather than the GPU. Getting a quad core i5 or i7 processor with 8GB of RAM and a good Video card would be the optimal build.

I have no idea what those mean. Can you explain what those things are in terms your grandmother would understand?

 

[DrunkenRine]

If the main thing that's bothering you is the time the AI takes during the turns after a certain point; you can significantly improve simply by turning on strategic view at the end of the turn; (showing moves is much faster in strategic mode)

hi joncnunn... lol, i actually am playing with strategic mode recently, at least at times of many battles occuring. i really like the options to alter the view and i usually use political map overlay with everything disabled exept units and terrainfeatures.

only thing im afraid of is getting used to it... because this would practically throw me back to pre-civ-1 times grafics wise ... which is kinda weird if you think about it.

 

[Exchequer]

Huge map with 20 city states and 12 players turn 208:
ram: 1400mb ram used (so no you do not need 8 gb)
gpu ram: 1500mb (so better graphics card helps)
cpu load: 45%
gpu load: 54%

Hardware used:
i5 2500k @4.0 Ghz
GTX 660 Ti @ 1210 Mhz (2 GB ram)
8 GB ram
resolution 1680x1050
settings: High+4x MSAA

The higher your resolution and game settings the better graphics card required. As you can see my current card is overkill for this game.

CPU is underused but does help to speed up the turns!

 

[Hammer Rabbi]

if you havent done this, in Task Manager you can see how many of your processors are used for your game. Go into Processes, right click on Civ and click Set Affinity to bring up the window to let you choose how many processors to use. for me, default was only one and since checking all 4 it helped a little.

but even on Huge epic/marathon i keep some comic books and sudoku puzzles handy, haha.