Not if the "anything" is made to run on 4 cores it won't. If the recommended spec is quad but the minimum is dual, the game must be heavily multithreaded. So in that case you will see a real difference as you add more cores.

Civ 5 is "threaded", but not in the sense that most programs are designed. Instead, the overall tasks are split up into hundreds of tiny "jobs", not large threads that are designed to go on specific cores.

There's a great video of a talk covering this, given by Dan Baker of Firaxis and Yannis Minadakis of Intel, from GDC 2010. (You can put in any info for the "registration" on the website when you watch it.)

The whole talk is about an hour long, and very technical early on. If you jump to half-way through, the first Video Demo at 30:12, there's some interesting info and demonstration of the Civ 5 engine at work. The last half of the video has more fun displays of the game systems at work.

They talk about a max unit test with 2000 animated characters on screen at once, and show off a demo of it with something like 5000 units on screen! Civ 4 and Civ Rev couldn't handle more than 100 at high frame rates, which was entirely a CPU problem. So this new system allows them to really do a lot more and scale up with systems that aren't even out yet. With the design of the infrastructure in Civ 5, they met their goal: Civ 5 will not typically be CPU bound for rendering.

Later in the talk, they go over the process of tweaking the display for the low-end version of graphics, that can run on the Intel HD Integrated graphics at 30FPS. It's interesting to see the comparison of the "full" graphics displayed side by side with the lower end one.

If you're interested in the details of game development or how Civ 5 works on different levels of CPU/GPU machines, it's well worth checking out.

"Civ games typically attract people that don't have high end gaming rigs."

Bonscott, that seemed a strange idea, but since Civ series includes Civ 3 still readily available and cheap it might be true! Civfanatics still shows a moderate amount of activity with Civ 3, including mods, $5 these days for Civ 3 complete. $5 is a lot less than $49.99. Sure, Civ 5 is a lot more game. My rig wildly exceeds minimum specs. But still ... were I to want to get back into Civ, is Civ 5 really going to be worth the $45 extra? Civ 4 is about $20 at the moment, probably much less shortly.

Civ 3 and Civ 4 are at mature patch level with huge amounts of mods and resources. Civ 5 will take a long time to reach the same level of maturity; and for all we know may be as buggy as a screen door at release. Me, I am going to sit back and watch youtube and read forums for a long time because not only am I stingy but I am also very lazy.

Yep, Civ 3 is still very active on Civ Fanatics.  Still plenty of mods created monthly and still have HOF and succession games.  Heck, there are still HOF type games and mods for Civ *.

Civ typically attracts the gamer that will play the game for years to come, many years.  Also attracts many people that might only buy one game a year, if that and last time they upgraded their computer was 6 yrs ago because guess what, a 6 yr old computer still is plenty fine for email, web and their strategy games.  I know quite a few people that the only games they ever buy are Civ, Sim City and maybe an RPG or two.  They don't have huge gaming rigs.  And often want to play on lower end laptops on the plane.

Of course I'm just generalizing but the typical Civ player is usually not the cutting edge FPS gamer with the screaming rig.  Not to say there aren't those gamers into Civ and maybe quite a few, but it's not what you typically think of as a "hardcore civ player".

One thing I'm really liking about Elemental is that you'll be able to play it with very low end hardware, GalCiv2 also played well on lower end hardware.  I think a lot of these hard core Civ players may give Elemental a try because of this (and other issues).  I almost see a MOO3/GalCiv thing going on but I don't think there is any way Civ 5 will be a bomb like MOO3, it's too big a franchise for that.  But I think you'll see a lot of hardcore turn based/strategy games move to Elemental.

I get the impression that Civ V is less interested in expansions this time around, and that we're probably going to see a bunch of microtransactions instead, aka overpriced DLC.

Which they'll probably bundle into an expansion at some point. They can't really add game systems as DLC, which is what the expansions typically do. Scenarios, Civs, and art? Sure. But they always add game systems later and that's just not well suited to a microtransaction model.

You can always wait for sale.  That's still sending a message. 

Seeing what has happened to Civ under 2K  is why I hope Stardock always stays independent. 

After watching gameplay videos, that user interface is making me kind of hot and bothered D:

Since it uses Steamworks, not happening in any legit way.

well if i have to, i have to... good thing is i wont have to pay an arm and a leg for a copy that I thought i would.. cdwow in Aus has the game preorder for $52 AUS! Bargain.. and so much lower than any other Aus shop

I dont get the people here claiming that CIV IV is worse than the previous games. CIV III towards endgame became more and more boring with micromanagement and very slow performance. The maintenance/corruption model was hopless too.

CIV IV AI was pretty good after a while in my opinion.

CIV IV is the game I have played the most and that says something for a 38 year old gamer

Did anyone else have alot of performance problem`s with Civ4?  I own vanilla plus the two expansions, Once the map became filled improvement`s there was ALOT of stuttering frame rates happening.  It killed the game for me, I can`t enjoy something that ran so poorly.

I first tried the game with a AMD X2 2.8 ghz, 3GB ram, 8800GT 512, Vista 32 bit.  It ran like shit no matter the graphic settings.  I then upgraded to an ATI 4870 1 GB and it still run`s like shit.  I`m assuming its because of the cpu.  If Civ4 was running on a single core, The clock speed just isn`t fast enough.

Any advice would be appreciated.

My computer is out of date.  it won't be able to play it even in the lowest imaginable setting.

I pass.  Civilizations  should be played on practically any system, and my 3.8 ghz, single processor with 4gb ram and a pimp video card could swing it.  Pass.