Space Empires V dies a slow death
And it has nothing to do with the gameplay. I can deal with the various flaws and annoyances since I love 4X games, but I ran into something insurmountable. Playing a small game ran fine. Now that I’m deep into a large game, SEV brings my Athlon 4200+ 64 X2 w/ 3GB RAM to its knees unlike any other game I’ve played. Sure, I couldn’t run Crysis on high detail, but even that performs better than late-game SEV. I timed the load times of several common activities:
- Clicking the “Close” button after a battle to return to the map: 16 seconds
- Saving the game: 1 min 38 seconds
- Loading a save: 30 seconds
- Clicking (NOT LOADING) a savegame in the load game menu: another 14 seconds
- Ending Turn: 4 minutes 3 seconds
My actual turn usually takes less than 2 minutes, and sometimes only 30 seconds.