Can anyone on this board play a full game of Civ 5?

Is it possible (and I expand this to desktops as well) to play a full game of Civ 5 with the largest map possible and not have a ton of lag. I have settings at medium and it's still a minute between turns and I get that red/white checkers on some tiles occasionally.

 

There is a long delay at the end of each turn in the late game on a huge map as the other civs complete their activities, but I was able to complete the game on my laptop at 1920x1080 resolution, all detail settings maxed.

I seem to recall that in the options I added a few more enemy civs but reduced the number of city states slightly.

 

Yeah city states are nothing buy annoyances. Only need a few. They're always whining for help, even when you're getting your butt kicked, and won't shut up.

 

One thing to note about Civ, and I mean all games in the series, is that the wait time is always CPU bound, not GPU bound. Graphics settings might make scrolling a bit smoother, and will increase the FPS during your turn of course, but will have at most a small effect on AI turn times. That's all waiting for the AI threads to complete on the CPU.

I've only played the demo of Civ5, but in previous iterations, items that have a significant effect on AI turn times include map size (obviously), the number of civilizations (not as drastic, but noticeable when it's significantly different), and the amount of trade routes that are possible (i.e., modding out most/all water/air trade will have a big effect). I've also read that the AI workers take up a disproportionate amount of AI turn time in Civ5, but I don't know of a fix for that.

So your options are (1) play with fewer civs/smaller maps, (2) mod the game to remove some of the slower elements, or see if someone has done a "fast AI" mod (these do exist for previous Civ incarnations, and if they right now don't for Civ5, they will eventually), (3) find a faster CPU (and from what I've read, per-core is more important than # cores in Civ5, as the AI is not very multithreaded), or (4) wait for some more patches, which might make a big difference. The patches certainly made a huge difference in Civ4's memory consumption - didn't solve everything, but they made a big difference.

 

NO.

i7-920XM might help a bit - around 30% compared to i7-720QM. If You have a weaker CPU... ...

NO difference between 4GB and 8GB of RAM.

You can max Your graphics settings, it will have no impact on the time needed to calculate next turn. You can try tactical map (F10 if I remember correctly); it will reduce the turn calculation time by approximately 50%.

PS.

I play this game on the laptop in my signature. Standard map size and reduction of number of AI opponents and/or city states help a lot.

 

Im interested in the game too but there are few benchmarks for my CPU, what C2D does it compare too?

 

Hm. I'll turn graphics back up then since I'm pretty sure my CPU is bottlenecking. I wish I hadn't started such a huge game but those are the most fun =p I'll just restart on a new map with a standard size.

Will going from 4 to 8GB of RAM really not do anything? Even with the tiles that occasionally get corrupted? I figured that was because there wasn't enough RAM to hold all of it.

 

I think it's actually the game that is the problem, not the system. I play with everything on high just fine on custom made large maps (I made one with 15 civs and 20 citystates, went fine), but I simply cannot complete huge maps. I think it has to do with the extra landmass on huge maps, since I was able to create an island based huge map and finish that one fine for the huge map achievement.

Also, I don't really see turn lag on my system regardless of map size, but huge maps tend to just flat out crash on me. That being said turning citystates off or limiting them to only a handful DOES show a speed increase.

 

I'll definitely consider turning city states off... thanks.

 

Also will playing on DX11 speed it up?

and 4GB of RAM are recommended for the game... so I feel like if you're playing huge maps you'd actually benefit from having 6 or 8GB.

Speedwise it's optimized for 4/6/8 cores it seems.

* Operating System: Windows Vista SP2/ Windows 7
* Processor: 1.8 GHz Quad Core CPU
* Memory: 4 GB RAM
* Hard Disk Space: 8 GB Free
* DVD-ROM Drive: Required for disc-based installation
* Video: 512 MB ATI 4800 series or better, 512 MB nVidia 9800 series or better
* Sound: DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card
* DirectX: DirectX® version 11

 

Easily be able to finish a game... have multiple times.... it does take a while to load after the end of your turn however late in the game but no "lag"... specs in sig

 

Same processor and RAM that I have. GPU shouldn't really make much difference.

Are you using huge maps and stuff?

It's not lagging necessarily, it just takes a long time between each turn.