Is there any way of getting more (any) performance out of an MP game?

[EntropicLqd]

Due to various friends and family enjoying the odd bit of Civ 5 I recently had the misfortune to start a large MP map with 6 human players (team 1) against 6 AI players (team 2), a bunch of city states and a large map.

In my naivete I thought it would work OK. It's not like Civ 5 has vast amounts of hot polygonal action. The reality was that it ran slower than a tortoise with cement shoes and a couple of bricks duck-taped to its back. And got worse as the game progressed (presumably the tortoise was expiring)

I thought it was my PC so I put the game into windowed mode to watch the CPU and memory use. Just for reference I'm running Win 7, an i7, 12GB of RAM, and a 2GB Radeon 9750. Not really short on resources.

I am truly in awe of an essentially turn based game that can, by default, use 50% of 4 cores, with occasional spikes using all 8 cores, for something that on the face of it, should be relatively (compared with an FPS on fully pretty) simple. My expectation was that the CPU would flat-line at 100% when the AI was "moving"; and boy was I wrong.

The only phrase I can think of that comes remotely close to my reaction is, "What were they thinking?".

As a result of my less than wonderful experience I have three questions.

1. Is there anything I can do now to improve the performance of a large MP game?
2. Are there any plans to fix the performance of large MP games in the future?
3. Is there an explanation anywhere of just what all that CPU resource is being used for when nothing is happening?
4. Is there a description of the network architecture (in terms of locking cells, token-ring-style approach) any place that might help me with 1?

OK, so as a result of an MP experience that has stretched the limits of incredulity, I have four questions (see above).

[Antony_Lee]

took away the lovely animations lol.

they have determine to answer some ppl not playing who cries (who is it ??) to include animations in multiplayers.

and not give us the choice of disabled it (quick combat) in multiplayer.
so, that's what you got.

may be internet multiplayer is expensive, so they are determine to kill it.

for example, you won't see games in many region by internet, because it is region lock (you won't see games in new york if you are in vancouver) ....

[EntropicLqd]

Actually, I don't care about animations in multiplayer.

I'm talking about raw game performance. Basic stuff like moving things around or selecting a new culture policy.

I'm talking about the fact that in the current game I'm playing, it will take over 2 minutes to move a unit. And that's timed between the point I click on the space I want the unit to move to and the time it actually moves.

I'm baffled at how the developers of the game could screw up something so fundamental; and am asking whether there is anything I can do to help the game along.

[Antony_Lee]

i guess you have turn on animations, see if you can get it faster if you are in tactical view mode ?

[EntropicLqd]

I thought of that. Going into the tactical view saves about 10% CPU.

Sadly the time it takes to move units, change production, etc etc remains at the same geological-time scale rate.

As far as I can tell, playing over the Internet with any more than 4 people is an exercise in extreme patience. Basically Firaxis screwed up.

[SlickSlicer]

try playing in strategic view.

[Littlisk]

How do you get tactical mode again?

[EntropicLqd]

try playing in strategic view.

I tried that. While it improves the CPU use, raw performance is not improved in anyway.

All indications are (based upon some fairly unscientific analysis) that the performance degrades (possibly geometrically or exponentially) with the number of human players.

How do you get tactical mode again?

Click on the globe in the bottom right hand corner, on the left of the mini-map iirc.

[civdiss]

Play with fewer city states (preferably 0) and fewer AI players (closer to 0 the better)..avoid automating workers and other units...that will minimise all performance issues you have..

[EntropicLqd]

Play with fewer city states (preferably 0) and fewer AI players (closer to 0 the better)..avoid automating workers and other units...that will minimise all performance issues you have..

That's a pretty interesting theory. It'll take a while to get everyone back together to test it; but test it I will.

In order for it to be true though it would mean that every time anyone moved a unit, or went to set production or a research goal the AI is being invoked. Which is such an insanely inefficient thing to do that I can't believe that Firaxis would have coded it up that way.

I look forward to doing the test. I shall report back eventually.

[civdiss]

every time anyone moved a unit, or went to set production or a research goal the AI is being invoked.

No that only happens if you automate workers or units to e.g. auto-explore, otherwise simply moving units from one tile to another or automating city production/tech research doesn't involve the AI.

[Grubsnik]

The game is played in semi-real time, with a lot of data being processed back and forth.

In reality this means if one of the other players is lagging out, everything will stall until his game catches up. I'm struggling with the same issue, where we have one friend in a group of 4 people playing that has a dated pc.

When you play with him, every turn starts with you unable to do anything for 2-15 seconds while his game is still catching up.

[humbe]

Think this is a bit dated. Used to be memory leaks earllier that I think was fixed. Haven't seen things going very slow in once own turn now, but turning takes more and more time. Seems to be relative to how much the AI has to do, but even with a small world with standard amount of AIs and city states things gets very slow when approaching modern times. And apart from the time it takes, it is frustrating that you don't see when you can start to do something, because you can give move orders, they just don't work until you have finished waiting.