I’ve been mostly playing small maps, but recently moved up to a standard one and am extremely annoyed by the slowdowns that I’m getting around the Renaissance era. It’s laggy moving around the map and taking 30 secs or more to load a turn. Granted, I have a lot of the graphical options turned up, but that shouldn’t affect turns taking so long, should it?
I’m running a core 2 duo (@4ghz) and 8gb memory. I guess it’s back to the small maps if I can’t get this fixed. I don’t even know what it’s like playing on large or bigger maps at that stage of the game. Although, I do remember turns taking forever in CivIV when it first came out.
That’s fairly typical performance for large maps (although 30 seconds is a LOT more than I usually wait on a lesser PC than you’ve got - my wait is generally about 10 seconds on a huge map decked out with plenty of civs and city states in the same era). It was discussed many moons ago, and as I recall the graphics/memory strain is considerably more than it would appear.
I would suggest staying zoomed in, as that will help considerably with the choppiness (albeit for exchanging the better view). Also, turning down some graphics options will likely provide some benefit.
Yeah, larger maps have extremely slow turns. Lizard King said he experienced the greatest speedup by reducing the number of city states. Graphics options may affect moving around the map but shouldn’t have any effect on the AI turn duration itself.
I appreciate that most people play games rather than study and debate them like this forum or CivFanatics, which is why I qualified my statement to just include the forums members.
My most common victory is me looking at the situation and deciding I’ve won no need to finish out the game this is true in Civ IV and V. The next most common was spaceship. In Civ IV this generally first involved waiting for the AI to declare war on me (to avoid the war weariness penalty) and then taking out one opponent. However by far the most fun I’ve had playing Civ is realizing after say 1200 AD or so that AI was still beating me. In about 2/3 of the situation I end up coming from behind to win in about 1/3 the AI won. In cases where my toughest opponent was on another continent I generally DIDN"T use military force to win.
The tactical AI in Civ V is so bad that using military force seems like cheating. So my question for those of you who don’t care that much about the wargame aspect of Civ V, is to do you find the Civ V AI to be a challenging opponent in a builder game? If so could you give examples of when say after 1500 AD or so that AI won or at least was competitive in endgame. Please include difficult level and rough number of cities you owned.
Alstein
4645
I’d make the argument that many (no idea how many) of the people playing on Steam, Civ V is their first Civ game, due to Steam. I don’t think the changes in Civ V which drove the grognards away were necessary to gain all those new fans.
Civ VI’s challenge is going to be getting the grognards back on board while keeping the Civ V newbies around.
Janster
4646
I have a problem thats been bugging me all xmas. I have been playing this 2 player matches with my friend. The setting is large map on epic with max AI.
Result : AI is crammed close to me or my friends cities, swamping us early on, while huge HUGE tracts of lands are left unsettled as no AI’s are spawned on them. Restart after restart the AI is often settled less than 5 spaces from my main city…ALL the time.
This is incredible irritating knowing we’re on a large map, which is more than capable of giving plenty of space to all AI involved…
Also it clumps the City states constantly. Is this by design?
Given Civ3 was a failure as well, with Civ5 being a failure there is a certain pattern now. Grognards grok patterns, and so they will return to Civ6 no matter what happens. :)
jpinard
4648
It totally depends on the map type and the start options. If you’ve left “start bias” on then the game is forced to put Civ’s in their corresponding terrain. This drastically diminishes the starting posts on most maps causing Civs to be clumped where needed. If I were you I’d turn CIty-States way down and substitute more real Civs, click “disable start bias” and select Pangaea with a low or medium water level.
Hans - one thing I’ve found perplexing with your arguments is that I’m a 99% builder in Civ. Always have been and generally hated going to war. But being a builder in Civ V feels sooooo very generic and boring I go to war just to break up the monotony. Whether winning or losing, finishing a game holds so little value compared to games past. The one thing I love about Civ, which I always have - is the intro game of building new cities and expanding to find or compete for the best city zones. I do realize you can specialize cities to an extent, but the degree to which you do this with a global happiness medium is unsatisfying. So my perplexing is how several of us who play the game the same way can feel so different about the experience.
Maybe a big part is because I almost never won a game in Civ IV on Prince level, while in Civ V (no matter how you play) - you can’t help but win on Prince, then King, and after that playing is pointless for me. I want a relatively fair game just like I’ve always had. The game is just a whole lot dumber whether playing as a builder or warrior - and that’s not fun nor excusable when they had a good base to work off. So maybe you’ve come to terms with loading the AI with massive bonus’s and cheats to be competetive… I (and many others) haven’t.
Enidigm
4649
They took Civ 5 in this weird minimalistic direction at the same time they took it toward Panzer General. Among other flaws. I like how “trade camps” are basically broken and nonsensical past the medieval age as well.
hong
4651
Trade camps. You know, when you camp a trade spawn point. This is obvious.
Dejin
4652
I’ve never beaten a Civ game above the Emperor level. I’m not an optimal build guy; I don’t do Infinite-City Sprawl because it’s boring, even if it might be optimal; I don’t spend time reading the CivFanatics forums to find the best stratgies; and I’m fine avoiding certain strategies if they exploit AI weakness too much. But I’ve beaten Civ V on the Deity level. This is far and away the weakest Civ AI I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been playing Civ’s since Civ 1. An even bigger concern is the poor handling of navy and air force. I haven’t played enough post-latest-patch for a full evaluation, but from many accounts it still does a horrible job with navy and air force. I don’t mind if the AI cheats, I don’t mind if the AI has production bonuses. But having the AI do goofy things with their ships or airplanes really wrecks the game.
Meanwhile, I’ve packaged the small change that increases minimum city distance from two to three hexes in a tiny mod: Wider City Spacing. The new section contains download links along with a brief description of how to use mods.
Alstein
4654
Holy crap. That is unexpected news.
Kael
4657
We’ve been having fun making fun of Jon’s picture in that article.
You guys are mean. He looks much better and far less nerdy than Mark Zuckerberg, which I also think rules out the possibility of him ever being a billionaire.
Tell me he didn’t wear a tie to the interview?!.
Seriously congratulations to both Jon and Stardock I think this is excellent news.
Honestly not sure what to make of it, but congratulations to Mr. Shafer, all the same.
