The AMD FX is your issue there.
Even when released it wasn't exactly the fastest thing on the market.

Your GPU could also do with a boost as well, the Radeon 7700 card despite being fantastic value back in 2012, hasn't aged well.

In short... Civilization 5 is a better fit for your PC, even then I would personally still upgrade.

Well. The single threaded performance isn't really the issue for Civilization...
It's that the multi-threaded performance of the FX chips, tend to not be great anyway.

From my extensive testing, there were gains when I went from 2-12 threads with Civilization 5.
I would imagine Civilization 6 has taken it farther. (But can't verify as I haven't played/tested it.)

With that in mind... A game doesn't actually need to leverage every CPU core for you to see a gain with more CPU cores.
I.E. Games that use 4 cores still saw improvements on my old 6-core processor.

In the AMD FX's case however... It is sharing an FP unit between two threads, hence, doubling the cores needed is extremely beneficial.

vivster said: Ka-pi96 said: Buy a 3DS and a copy of Pokemon. Turn times will still be long, but you won't notice since you'll be playing Pokemon while they take their sweet time How long are the turn times in Pokemon?

Way too long.
Pokemon needs to take a page out of the Fire Emblem book in that regard.
Just shut up and let me play.

Oh, and just buy a decent PC.
Having adequate hardware helps, when trying to run games.
Just be glad that you can run the game at all, with a system like that.

I bet it's a lot faster if you put a newer Intel i7 into your 3DS.

Thanks. So what exactly should I upgrade to? Can I get away with just upgrading the CPU? I've never been the sort of person that cares about graphics. I still play two to three gen 5 or 6 games a year. 

Edit: I think I'll just upgrade to the recommended specs for Civ 6 and Sega's Warhammer series. 

It might be that you see some improvements with more cores, but isn’t that mainly because you unload OS and other background task to the other cores witch frees up more cycles on the core that runs the turn calculation.

I remember the night and day difference in Civ V between the patch that allowed usage of multiple cores and how the game was before that patch. But the thing with that patch was that it unloaded the UI to the other cores while the turn calculation was still only done on one core. But suddenly you could actually browes different menus and stuff while turns where calculating and without it slowing down the turn calculation (since the core didn’t need to share cycles) (btw I always play on huge maps with maximum amount of civilizations -4, so late game always take a while between every turn).

But I promise you  both Civ 5 and Civ 6 will run one core 100% and one or two cores at 5-10% during a turn calculation. Since the game is turn based the game calculations have to be sequential. It can only calculate one AI at a time since the outcome of the actions of one AI may/will affect the next one i turn. Even within one AI each troop movement will effect the next so every calculation needs to be sequential and thus the really calculation heavy tasks (aside from graphics) can't be parallelised and won’t see much or any gain from using multiple cores (aside from unloading trivial tasks like sound, UI etc to other cores).

That makes a lot of sense. Sounds to me like I should aim for clock speeds over core numbers. Can windows, antivirus, and other non-game background things all run on a single core while still leaving enough cores for the game to run audio, UI, and non-turn processing items? 

Civilization is a great series, but the biggest frustration I've always had with it is that the game takes a lot longer when you get to the modern era. This problem goes all the way back to the first Civilization. The way that I've solved this problem is that I play Civilization Revolution on a console. However now I have a problem in that they don't make sequels to Civ Revolution on console.

Huh. I've been hearing complaints about turn length in VI, but I think they were far worse in V (at least back when it was fairly new). Maybe my memory's just not serving me right.

There are lots of reasons.

* Cache is often shared between multiple CPU cores, so if a Core is being underutilized, then another Core in theory has access to more overall cache.

* CPU's tend to turbo if TDP and loads are acceptable. I.E. A CPU is less likely to turbo on all-cores if they are loaded to 100%.

* In Civilizations case, they offload things like the UI and Audio onto other free cores, freeing up cycles for the cores that need it.

* And in the AMD FX's case, they have half the number of FP units anyway, so doubling down on core counts is beneficial in titles which are FP heavy.

When I was playing around with Civilization 5, all my CPU cores were being utilized, bulk weren't being utilized to 100%, but certainly more overall than a 4-core CPU could have coped with.
There is of course a "Master Core" where the bulk of the games calculations are being done.

I have been running with a 6-core processor or better since 2010, so games scaling to more cores isn't a new concept to me.

Depends on what else you have going on.
I was running the game at 5760x1080 and 7680x1440 resolutions back in the day. Never saw core utilization drop below 30% across every CPU core.
But the old Phenom 2 rig I had was always pegged at 100%.

Well. That is the design choice they took.

Depends on your budget.
But the Core i5 8600K is good value.
As well as AMD's Ryzen 5 2600X (6 cores). - I am seeing the Ryzen 5 1700 for a lower price than the Ryzen 5 2600X, which I would personally opt for due to the extra CPU cores.

You will need a new motherboard and new Ram.

GPU wise, the Radeon RX 580 and Geforce 1060 are good mid-range offerings, if you want cheaper than that though, the Radeon RX 570/Geforce 1050 Ti are good alternatives.

Why would I need a new motherboard and new ram? Is a motherboard from 2012/13 not going to be compatible with a new processor and GPU? At this rate, I might as well build a whole new PC. Or would it be ok to keep the HDD, case, and PSU? The case is big enough to hold whatever you put in it, and has plenty of fans. The PSU is gold standard. An Harddrive is a harddrive right? 

I'm only looking to play Civ 6, Endless Legend, Endless Space, and the Warhammer Total War duo. So I'd rather keep the costs as low as I can get them, while still having turn times of ten seconds or less, late game. 

Edit: Upgrading the GPU at this time is outside of my price range. Would I run into any compatibility issues if I just go out and get a new motherboard, ram, and CPU?