Another Fail of Civ V, I just have noticed. Please 2K can you fix this.

[Davor]

Yes this is old news, but I just have realized this is a small issue, I wish 2K will correct.

It is when the game starts. I just got myself a new game last week, and just now, as I was about to play it, it takes me from double clicking the icon to start it, to actually playing a game, less than 30 seconds.

To start up Civ V, it takes about 2 minutes just to get to the screen then another minute to load a game, so that is about 3 or 4 minutes from double clicking the icon to actually start playing a game.

It all comes down to coding. How come other games don't take this long to load a game. Lets forget about loading the game for a minute and talk about starting up the game. These are turn based games I am talking about that I can start playing within 30 seconds but Civ V wich is suppose to be the crem de la crem of turn based games doesn't?

I guess it's a moot point for some, but for me, this is a big issues. I look at other games with smaller budgets, smaller work force, but the game runs better and more stable. Ok the stabability in Civ V seems to be good now, so now what needs to be worked on is the load times and how fast the game loads when you start it. I just can't believe "lesser games" load faster and better than Civ V.

I say Civ V is a great game now, having lots of fun with it, but wanted to play a space game TBS, and now see how different the load times are.

Can this be corrected?

[jallal]

Yes. U must buy NASA computer and then u will have things a lot more faster

[civvy]

just leave it on all the time. Problem solved!

[stethnorun]

Having to load the game is a "fail"? You are going to be highly disappointed by almost all PC games then, my friend. Better stay away from Total War games, especially.

[slowtarget]

Which Civ-equivalent TBS game would this be? Obviously not anything from Total War or Samurai II.

[Simkill]

Having to load the game is a "fail"? You are going to be highly disappointed by almost all PC games then, my friend. Better stay away from Total War games, especially.

Going into any battle in total war 2 takes an absolute age, but at least the game works properly.

[stethnorun]

Going into any battle in total war 2 takes an absolute age, but at least the game works properly.

Well since Civ 5 works properly as well, I guess it's a pretty good comparison isn't it?

[Simkill]

Well since Civ 5 works properly as well, I guess it's a pretty good comparison isn't it?

Ha, you jest sir, you jest.

[SilverMoonFlare]

The engine coding is bad. Not only it's slow to load but it also has some of the most retarded bugs ever - placing Machu Picchu on top of Old Faithful or Cerro de Potosi or wonders that appear in water. I don't know how THAT is not fixed yet. Maybe they are to busy creating DLC -_-

[Mega-Dolphin]

What's your computer then? I have a Core 2 Quad Q9400 @ 2.66 GHz, 3GB of DDR2-800 RAM, 2 GeForce 9600GTs in SLI mode, a 500 GB SATA-II HDD at 7200 RPM. When I play Civ5, I have nothing but system processes, antivirus, and Steam running for a total of 47 processes on Windows Vista Home Premium SP2 32-bit. From the moment that I click the DirectX10/11 option, it takes 52 seconds to load to the ESRB screen. I immediately load a savegame on a standard archipelago map at turn 133, which takes 1 minute, 9 seconds to the time that the "Continue your journey" screen is in the center of my monitor.

The biggest difference I would suppose is what is being loaded during loading. If Civ5 started loading graphics data during the startup load, then there would be longer load times than if it only loaded the main menu. Also, I added the option in the config files to disable hotloading, whatever effect that has.

[stethnorun]

Ha, you jest sir, you jest.

Well then there are TONS of people playing broken game on Steam and loving it. Strange.

[slowtarget]

What's your computer then? I have a Core 2 Quad Q9400 @ 2.66 GHz, 3GB of DDR2-800 RAM, 2 GeForce 9600GTs in SLI mode, a 500 GB SATA-II HDD at 7200 RPM. When I play Civ5, I have nothing but system processes, antivirus, and Steam running for a total of 47 processes on Windows Vista Home Premium SP2 32-bit. From the moment that I click the DirectX10/11 option, it takes 52 seconds to load to the ESRB screen.

Adding to the data set:

Core i7 2600K @ 4.5GHz
16 GB of DDR3-1600 RAM
GeForce GTX 560Ti
Crucial C300 128GB SSD
Windows 7 (87 Processes, SMB/CIFS mounts, Apache, X11 Server)
Apps running (Firefox, Thunderbird, Eclipse, LibreOffice)

Load time from DirectX11 selection to ESRB Notice: 21.22 seconds.

For comparison: Load times:
TeamFortress 2: 22.51 seconds.
Mass Effect 2: 24.82 seconds
Shogun II: (Long time... Seriously: I don't have the patience to start it just for this post)

Yeah... Civ V really needs to work on its load times.

[Benfea]

Yes this is old news, but I just have realized this is a small issue, I wish 2K will correct.

It is when the game starts. I just got myself a new game last week, and just now, as I was about to play it, it takes me from double clicking the icon to start it, to actually playing a game, less than 30 seconds.

To start up Civ V, it takes about 2 minutes just to get to the screen then another minute to load a game, so that is about 3 or 4 minutes from double clicking the icon to actually start playing a game.

It all comes down to coding. How come other games don't take this long to load a game. Lets forget about loading the game for a minute and talk about starting up the game. These are turn based games I am talking about that I can start playing within 30 seconds but Civ V wich is suppose to be the crem de la crem of turn based games doesn't?

I guess it's a moot point for some, but for me, this is a big issues. I look at other games with smaller budgets, smaller work force, but the game runs better and more stable. Ok the stabability in Civ V seems to be good now, so now what needs to be worked on is the load times and how fast the game loads when you start it. I just can't believe "lesser games" load faster and better than Civ V.

I say Civ V is a great game now, having lots of fun with it, but wanted to play a space game TBS, and now see how different the load times are.

Can this be corrected?

I play other games that load in a fraction of a second. This other game you played is obviously a complete failure. You should return it to the store and ask for your money back.

[Goosse]

I never really looked at load time. I am usually starting up my game as I prepare supper or am finishing up some other task. I am use to business applications taking 5+ minutes to load. The more customizable the application, the longer to load. I have had many games over the years that were either slow to load or slow to play. It was usually my hardware. Upgrade = faster.

I am running on a low end game machine. AMD Phenom II X6 8GB + ATI 5450 1G. Graphics are run at the low end. After reading this I timed my load. 45 seconds from double click to game up. 1 minute 45 seconds to load a huge continent in turn 338. But without spending time analyzing all parts of my system, I don't know where the bottle neck is. For all I know, it is the HDD. I had one system in the past that speeded up when I replaced the HDD. I know that background tasks can slow down a system. I learned that when games slow down an unreasonable amount, such as late game when the total number of objects has increased substantially, I startup with only essential tasks and things improve. My current game machine has some things turned off that I never use.

From my persective and experience, people who complain about poor load times and slow games, either haven't seen enough real world programs for comparison, or they don't know how to optimize for the task. Mine Sweeper loads faster, but is also not nearly as complex and large as Civ V.

After purchasing a computer above the recommened requirements, I have enjoyed the game extreamly well. I needed to do a work around for a while due to playing an extended game with the scrolling crash issue, but that has been the worst so far and was only a minor inconvienience.

As far as some strange graphics overlay issues (a building sitting on water), programming for every situation takes more development cost and causes game slowdown for the extra instructions that need to execute. In order to get all buidings on a one hex island would either need to shrink the buildings to fit, or to not display them. I play the game for the strategy. Eye candy is nice, but not high on the enjoyment factor. I have missed many of the graphics inconsistancies until someone lists them as a bug. Then they are merly ammusing.

[Davor]

Well I didn't mean to sound like I was complaining. I guess, that is a total fail on my part. What I ment to say, Playing games like Sword of the Stars or Star Ruler, the games are really fast in loading up.

So I apologize if it seemed whiney, it was not my intent.

So that out of the way, I still can't see why Civ V takes so long to start up. Before patches, I could start playing when the fire pit shows up, just when the old man comes in, now after the patch, I have to wait till after the Viking ships or even sometimes wait till the entire movie is done. So that doesn't make sense, a patch is suppose to fix things, not slow things down.

Again, sorry 2K if it sounded I was complaining, it was not my intent, I am enjoying Civ V now.

[Strudo76]

So that doesn't make sense, a patch is suppose to fix things, not slow things down.

Fixing something so it works correctly, and the speed that some event takes to complete, aren't always in a fixed means faster relationship either.

[Noobleton]

It takes a while to load for me - but I am using a Dell Inspiron (3gb RAM, Celeron Dual-Core @1.90GHz - not too amazing) so it's to be expected

I solve the problem by playing Civ for longer sessions to avoid starting up and loading constantly

[stethnorun]

Well I didn't mean to sound like I was complaining. I guess, that is a total fail on my part. What I ment to say, Playing games like Sword of the Stars or Star Ruler, the games are really fast in loading up.

So I apologize if it seemed whiney, it was not my intent.

So that out of the way, I still can't see why Civ V takes so long to start up. Before patches, I could start playing when the fire pit shows up, just when the old man comes in, now after the patch, I have to wait till after the Viking ships or even sometimes wait till the entire movie is done. So that doesn't make sense, a patch is suppose to fix things, not slow things down.

Again, sorry 2K if it sounded I was complaining, it was not my intent, I am enjoying Civ V now.

Both of those games require less than half of the assets used in Civ 5. Space games, by their very nature, require less to run than land-based games (space is empty). I'm surprised you couldn't figure that out yourself before posting.

[slowtarget]

Well I didn't mean to sound like I was complaining. I guess, that is a total fail on my part. What I ment to say, Playing games like Sword of the Stars or Star Ruler, the games are really fast in loading up.

Okay... time to actually return to reality:

Sword of the Stars:
Released: August 2006
Requirements: 1.5GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, 128 MB video card, DirectX 8, Windows 2000.

...and a little better...

Star Ruler:
Released: Sept 2010
Requirements: 2.0GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, 256MB video card, Windows XP/Vista

Let's take a moment to really bask in the facts we have here. Both of these are Indie Games (no offense, Indies can be great, innovative games) with large scope but lightweight resource use. The more advanced of the two (Star Ruler) still only uses simple spheres with opaque textures (which are trivial to render). There are no/few dynamic lights. No dynamic shadows. Models are blocky and low-polycount with only simplistic shading. It's impressive for an Indie game, but when comparing this to AAA games, the technology is a few years behind.

And Sword of the Stars. Seriously? It's a game from 2006. Look at the requirements. Except for having a slower CPU, my phone pretty much meets those specs. 128MB of RAM? I had that in 2003. I just donated a six year old computer that exceeded those specs. You're comparing Civ V, a flagship, AAA, genre-defining game to that game?

Seriously?

128MB video card? Crap. Yeah, I'm not shocked that started right up.

So that out of the way, I still can't see why Civ V takes so long to start up.

Compared to what?

As I stated above, it starts faster than Mass Effect 2 and Team Fortress 2. And definitely faster than Empire: Total War and Shogun II. Are you seriously saying that it starts slow because --despite starting faster than many games released last year-- it fails to start faster than low-detail, low-resource, low-power games designed for seriously low-end hardware?

Now, I can see the argument (its an old, boring one) that those games might be just as fun as Civ V. I don't doubt it. The difference between Indie games and AAA games isn't in fun or mechanics, but in polish, atmosphere, and ambiance. It's the music, the sound, the textures, the movies, and the models that make the difference. Star Ruler and Sword of the Stars simply can't even come close to matching Civ V for any of those things. Does that make it less fun? No. But you're paying for an experience.

If you don't care so much about the experience, then heed this advice: Buy and play indie games. They are cheaper and just as fun.

Ignoring that: Complaining that Civ V doesn't load as fast as something like Star Ruler is just silly. You might as well argue that it doesn't load as fast as Oregon Trail.

Before patches, I could start playing when the fire pit shows up, just when the old man comes in, now after the patch, I have to wait till after the Viking ships or even sometimes wait till the entire movie is done. So that doesn't make sense, a patch is suppose to fix things, not slow things down.

Why is that? Improving stability often results in lower performance. Data checks take time. Safe function calls require sanitation and error handling. Furthermore, making the game run smoother during actual play-time can often be accomplished by taking more time to load data and cache decomposed forms at startup. Remember Civ IV? At launch it started up fairly quickly. After a couple of patches, it took significantly longer because they learned that there were corruptions making it into the game because they weren't verifying the XML and data cache every time the game loaded. Result: Patch fixed things and made the game load slower.