Apolyton just linked to this brief interview with Dan Baker of Firaxis regarding Civ5’s use of DirectX 10.1 and 11. I can confirm that leader screens pop up instantly on my ATI HD-5850 – a huge improvement over Civ4 where leader windows always took one or more seconds to show up.
DeepT
3322
The HARD part is the 5 civics. The build the wonder project should just be a token thing, that isn’t the hard part. I might try this again as a single city civ on an archipelago map next.
pilonv1
3323
My 1 city challenge on a tiny Earth map is infested with Barbarians, specifically in North America and SE Asia/Australia. Every second turn there’s a new camp with 2 ships and 3-4 other units annoying me.
I’ve never found them to be such a pain before.
Tony_M
3324
North America and Australia full of barbarians? Alot of Englishmen might say that an accurate depiction of the earth.
I got a kick out of my current Prince-level game when I sent my first Caravel out exploring the waters. I came upon an isolated group of mini islands (1-2 tiles) with a barbarian encampment that had been spawning triemes. All the triemes were stuck in the shallow waters around all the little islands, one for each tile available. I spent a little time knocking them off until I didn’t get any more xp from them, and then carried on my way. I expect they’ll fill up the area again. Maybe they’ll start launching ships that can actually go somewhere later on.
I believe the most advanced ship the Barbarians can build is equal to the most advanced ship that any one of the civilizations can build.
I didn’t realize there was benchmarks built in until seeing that article. They’re described in “Civilization 5 Benchmark modes.doc” in the root Civ directory (same place the exe’s and read me.pdf’s).
I ran the LateGameView and got:
[284166.647] LateGame Full Render Score , 1432, NumDrawCallsPerFrame ,0
[284166.647] LateGame NoShadow Render Score , 1885, NumDrawCallsPerFrame ,0
[284166.647] LateGame No Render Score , 3439, NumDrawCallsPerFrame ,0
No idea if these are good or bad :P
[Edit: they’re the number of frames rendered in 60 seconds. The first one is using whatever graphic settings I’ve picked, the second is the same as the first except without shadows, the third is what you’d get with some mystical, infinitely fast vidcard.]
Core 2 Duo at 3.4 ghz
ATI Radeon 5870
8 gigs ram
Win 7 x64
JMR
3328
Here’s a link breaking down performance of CPUs and GPUs running Civ 5.
That sounds plausible. Which is a royal pain when they can build destroyers. In my latest game, trying for conquest with the Egyptians, I launched a major invasion in the late 1800’s. I had a large modern army (tanks, arty and infantry) against the Greek and Persian riflemen and cannons. Victory seemed assured. Unfortunately, this, the largest display of military power ever amassed in the history of mankind, ran into two barbarian pirates on the ocean, and 80% was lost at sea. I had foolishly escorted my army with battleships, which couldn’t see the pirates - and when detected, couldn’t catch up with them.
I would prefer if new barbarians would not spawn after Steam Power or something along those lines.
Interesting info. It explains why running the Core i7 930 with the GTX460 1GB allows me to run Civ5 with maxed settings, even with 8xAA, at 1920x1200. It gives me some tweaking room if I run into framerate issues later on, although I’m playing a large map right now and am past the year 2000 and don’t seem to be having any issues (but I may be less sensitive to performance troubles than others).
My impression was that Civ5 had the potential to bring my computer to its knees, but I guess this revamp of the hardware paid off. Pleasantly surprised, I must say.
Daagar
3331
I’m a bit surprised that a turn-based game is so demanding. My system (yes, held back by a 9600GT) can play Just Cause 2, yet would suffer in Civ V. That’s… odd.
Very useful, thanks. A lot of those options mean very little to me and it’s good to have them broken down like that. At the prices it would take to significantly upgrade my card, I might as well go for one of the “you’re crazy, early adopter” SSD sizes and switch to that.
Quitch
3333
Just bought a copy after getting bitten by the “one more turn” bug in the demo.
Whether it’s turn-based or not is not really relevant to the frame rate. Rendering isn’t much affected by what’s moving, it’s mostly affected by the complexity of what you’re showing. Civ V has some very complex models, and a lot of them are on screen at once.
I’m wondering how far down off the chart my 2x 8800 GT / SLI cards fall. Certainly I hate it when the leaders call me to say something inane, because the load time for that screen is 10-15 seconds on my system.
I had thought it was just the Pangaea map that made Prince level unusually difficult. But then I realized I had set the game speed to Quick in all the Prince games I lost! After changing the speed back to normal Prince was no harder than usual, and I won my next Pangae game right away. Looks like the Quick setting is broken and gives the AI faster build/research times than the human player. Sigh.
Another bug I noticed: sometimes only the right panel (your offers) show up in the trade screen. Clicking on the Defensive Pact option restored the opposite panel, apparently because it’s a mutual treaty.
The Pangaea game I won as Napoleon was glorious, though. Harun al Rashid sat on a peninsula, separated from me on the mainland by Seoul and a mountain chain. (I do love how Civ5 places mountains in long chains so they actually matter!) Of course I made sure to be Seoul’s best friend, and the city remained my frontier fortress for the rest of the game. Harun did conquer it twice but I retook it immediately, thanks to my tech advantage and a little help from two frigates with their shore bombardment.
The western part of the map was pure insanity. Bismarck and Catherine were alternately fighting each other and me, and I was alternately allying with either of them. Well, Catherine eventually lost but not before I had grabbed two of her cities with my vast medieval army (three longswordsmen, two crossbowmen, and even one knight). That left Bismarck, and soon after he had captured Moscow he marched against my Maginot line! Two fortresses and the Foreign Legion held off the onslaught long enough until I could build enough reinforcements to force a peace treaty. Later he decided to molest poor weak Harun instead, and I moved on to a spaceship victory.
Still not sure how anyone is supposed to win a cultural victory. I can get four complete policy trees, sure, but five? And then a wonder?
Single city, wonders oriented. Granted, that was on warlord, but I think the strategy is sound. It just has to be a good one city (the single city restriction actually helps, since you get “insta-raze”) for any who encroach on your turf.
I don’t get it. How does a single city produce more culture than multiple cities with culture buildings and policies?
It’s more about how the amount of culture required for policies stays low with a single city, I think.
But yeah, it doesn’t make any sense to me either.
schurem
3339
the more cities you have, the more expensive social policies become. for the culture win three cities is the sweet spot afaik.
I’m not convinced about that. More cities does mean more expensive social policies, but it also means more production for wonders (and for self-defence!), more culture buildings, and more money for buying cultured friends. My culture win attempt has been with Persia. I initially built three cities, then slowly expanded to six (and recently lost one in a major war, still ongoing). By coasting along on a wave of Golden Ages (taking advantage of the Persian trait) I’ve managed to build a lot of +culture wonders, and earned a lot of money to spend on city states (boosted by the Patronage policies) who give me more culture.
Stealing most of the wonders and skimping a bit too much on defence has drawn a war declaration from the two strongest powers in the game, so right now culture is taking a back seat to national survival. But it’s 1846 and I’m only 2 policies shy of having three complete branches.
