Civilization V

I was playing another game as Korea on King difficulty this time to make wonder spamming easier, and I absolutely love playing them for my usual builder strategy :)


I got my first 4 great people on the same turn, and settled them all to make super tiles. Tradition, Liberty, Freedom and Rationalism are my favorite policy tress and I always like playing tall empires focused on wonders, specialists, science and culture.
 
bhavv said:
Well, everything is fine, except for the pathetic AI.

This is on Emperor difficulty, China had the most powerful military as they were attempting to warrior rush me:


I killed all the warriors with just one Archer garrisoned in my capital.
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This is spot on. It's such a shame as otherwise it's a remarkably great game. The military AI is amongst the worst I can recall from any game I've played.

Really hope it gets patches and that they sort it out for Civ 6.
 
Mak3R said:
Anybody use crossfire with this game? I only get 1 GPU utilised while the other sits idle...which i find odd to say the least.
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Unfortunately its an Nvidia optimized game, and it runs like crap on most AMD graphics cards (Just like Shogun does on Nvidia hardware :x).

Its also a massive CPU hog and the second most CPU stressful thing on my PC to run after Prime 95.

If anyone has a shiny Intel I7 hex core, this is the one game out there that will fully utilize one of those chips.

A lot of Civ fans have been complaining about the high system requirements since it launched because past Civ games had very low system requirements and were never meant to be graphically complex.

But I disagree with such complaints, I like one of favorite games actually being able to make use of the hardware I have :D

Basically to run Civ V comfortably at max settings, you need at least an I5 CPU highly clocked, 4 Gb ram, and a GTX 460. The performance barely scales past 30 fps on ATI cards, unless its recently been been patched or anything. More than 4 Gb ram doesnt affect the game at all, and the performance scales the most with the CPU.

I had to restart my current game because I messed it up big time by building trading posts along my rivers instead of farms (why did my silly brain ever think that +1 gold would be better than +2 food? :x). This time I got the Temple of Artemis, Great Library, Hanging Gardens, Stonehenge, Hagia Sophia and Chichen Itza all done by 155 BC :D. Though my triple specialist pop still happened at around 40 AD because it takes the same amount of time to accumulate enough points.
 
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bhavv said:
Basically to run Civ V comfortably at max settings, you need at least an I5 CPU highly clocked, 4 Gb ram, and a GTX 460. The performance barely scales past 30 fps on ATI cards, unless its recently been been patched or anything. More than 4 Gb ram doesnt affect the game at all, and the performance scales the most with the CPU.
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Not sure where you've got your info from but I'm using a measly dual-core E8400 running at a lethargic 3.6ghz on default volts. It can run at 4ghz but I don't see any need to for the increased volts and heat. Running an MSI TwinFrozrII 5850. Ok I think it's overclocked out of the box at 725/1000 but again I don't bother overclocking any further myself as there's no need.

Game runs very smooth at 1920x1080 with maximum details in DX11 with 4xAA. That's on Huge maps with 12 Civs and 20 CS. These settings are about as demanding as you can set them and I have no need to try and push my PC and overclock to it's limits.

I've heard complaints from some on the forums that their game starts to chug towards the end but that includes users with more powerful machines than mine and also nVidia owners. The only complaint I have with this setup is the graphics card is fully loaded all the time. GPU never drops below 90%, luckily this card has an excellent cooler but if it was a reference cooler I could see things getting quite toasty.
 
Chong Warrior said:
Not sure where you've got your info from but I'm using a measly dual-core E8400 running at a lethargic 3.6ghz on default volts. It can run at 4ghz but I don't see any need to for the increased volts and heat. Running an MSI TwinFrozrII 5850. Ok I think it's overclocked out of the box at 725/1000 but again I don't bother overclocking any further myself as there's no need.

Game runs very smooth at 1920x1080 with maximum details in DX11 with 4xAA.
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It depends entiely on what you find smooth. 30 FPS is noticeably glitchy and unplayable for me, and I need a minimum of 40 FPS.

The CPU scaling review is here:

http://www.techspot.com/review/320-civilization-v-performance/page11.html

I have my I7 920 running at 3.8 Ghz on low volts which is the sweet spot for Civ V, and only run it higher when I need my room heating :p

GPU performance is here, with the GTX 460 outperforming the 5870:

http://www.techspot.com/review/320-civilization-v-performance/page6.html

All you need for 40 FPS+ is a 3.8 Ghz quad core CPU plus a GTX 460.

CPU definitely affects the game far more than GPU does from that review - a GTX 480 running on a stock clock I7 920 @ 2.66 Ghz only runs the game at 35 FPS, but increasing the CPU up to 3.8 Ghz brings the performance up to 50 FPS+.

There are lots of user posts too showing the game fully utilizing hex core CPUs, I've checked this myself and the game definitely evenly loads every core on my I7 920. The game would be playable on a Dual Core intel CPU and a 5850, but theres no way it would be running over 40 FPS fully maxed out at 1080p or higher, more like around 30 fps at which I can notice lag and stuttering when moving the camera around in Civ V (I have locked the FPS to 30 when making recording in afterburner and could see too much lag. Increasing it to 35 FPS made it smooth, but unrecordable).

The performance may have improved since those reviews via patches and driver updates though, but I'm sure that the GTX 460 is still outperforming ATI cards in this game (due to biased Nvidia optimized coding, not anything to do with the hardware).
 
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bhavv said:
It depends entiely on what you find smooth. 30 FPS is noticeably glitchy and unplayable for me, and I need a minimum of 40 FPS.
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Ok
bhavv said:
The CPU scaling review is here:

http://www.techspot.com/review/320-civilization-v-performance/page11.html
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Those results must be from a poorly coded beta version of Civ V. Either that or their test PC was setup by my grandma :D
bhavv said:
The game would be playable on a Dual Core intel CPU and a 5850, but theres no way it would be running over 40 FPS fully maxed out at 1080p or higher, more like around 30 fps at which I can notice lag and stuttering when moving the camera around in Civ V (I have locked the FPS to 30 when making recording in afterburner and could see too much lag. Increasing it to 35 FPS made it smooth, but unrecordable).
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I don't see what more I can do other than post a screenshot (For quality take into account FRAPS will only screenshot as a .bmp and uploading to photobucket auto converts to .jpg and downscales the pic massively to 1024x768). As you can see it's at max detail, with 4xAA at 60fps and that's with V-Sync enabled. That is E8400 at 3.6ghz and 5850 at default speed, I could easily overclock more but as I said, I don't need to.

CivilizationV_DX112011-10-1216-51-33-92.jpg


CivilizationV_DX112011-10-1217-24-17-00.jpg


The only time the game lags is when it first loads up, it runs at approx 10fps as I scroll around the screen and all the textures load up. 10 secs later it runs smooth and I don't care who you are, when I say smooth, it's silky smooth.
 
Ok it seems to be fixed now. Do you get any crash to desktops with high quality leader scenes? I still have my leader scenes on medium because high quality always used to cause the game to crash.

I'm running at 1920x1200, 8x AA, everything but leader scenes on high, and it stays at 60 FPS with Vsync on.



One thing I hate is that AA doesnt apply to the leader scenes :(

I just tried high quality leader scenes again, clicked on polynesia in the diplo screen, and it caused my PC to reboot :X
 
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bhavv said:
Ok it seems to be fixed now. Do you get any crash to desktops with high quality leader scenes? I still have my leader scenes on medium because high quality always used to cause the game to crash.
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No, thankfully never had any problems with how Civ V runs. Though I only played two full games when it was first released and thought the AI was so poor the game offered zero challenge, so I stopped playing it.

Only started playing it again about 6 weeks ago. Overall the game is much improved but even on Immortal the AI isn't much of a challenge and battles can be won even when outnumbered 10:1
 
Dammit!!!!



I will need to reload to spam all the XP buildings in my Capital which also has brandenburg gate, and work all the production tiles for a total of 156 production per turn :D
 
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About a month ago, I read how the game was practically broken when it was released so wanted to let them fix it before I finally picked it up. It's not a bad game, but is a large step back in terms of complexity IMO.
 
Stag said:
About a month ago, I read how the game was practically broken when it was released so wanted to let them fix it before I finally picked it up. It's not a bad game, but is a large step back in terms of complexity IMO.
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I bought it on release and not played it since, was hoping they would have sorted the AI out by now but apparently not..
 
Stag said:
I would give it another go, the AI is supposedly improved, it's still not brilliant mind.
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It is most definitely NOT improved. The AI is completely useless and cant even capture cities with a single ranged defender.

It makes for a fun builder game because the AI literally cant touch your cities, but if you like playing Civ as a war game, Civ V will disappoint.

The only thing that the AI manages to do during wartime is pillage your resources. They can send an endless wave of whatever units they can build against you, but they will all get crushed by a human controlled city with a ranged / siege unit, even more so if you take the defensive policies in Tradition + Freedom (which absolutely no one prioritizes taking, those two policies are always left till the end to complete the branches).

Montezuma kept on attacking me all the time in my current game ... and everytime his Great General was running within range of my cities and units without a defender, making it easy peasy to pick off.

I completely went overboard in one game with a huge defensive barrier of Hwachas and Fortresses to keep the AI at bay, but it completely isnt needed at all as simply garrisoning the latest siege weapon in your cities makes them invincible to the AI.
 
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