Stardock implemented a different sort of turn processing in GalCiv II that allows the AI to plan its moves, etc. during the idle CPU cycles when the human player is figuring out what to do in GalCiv II, as per a dev journal way back when they were making GC2. This is why Stardock's TBSes have faster end turn processing without sacrificing AI capability.
Civ V has a lot going for it and overall I do find the game itself enjoyable, but end turn processing taking 30, 60 or even more seconds is a big source of frustration for a lot of players. Even playing on the largest map settings, GalCiv and Elemental only take a few seconds at most to process turns, the slowest turn processing coming from moving units set to automatic moves (auto-explore, or a long-distance move). I was curious if Firaxis would tip its hat to Stardock and adopt this, as this has been a growing annoyance with every iteration of the Civ series. Firaxis did seem to adopt a couple things from Stardock into Civ V, but processing turns obviously isn't one of them.
Civ V has a very long way to go. I really doubt they'll rewrite the engine to copy Stardock's model, but their engine definitely needs some work. They do, apparantly, offload some work onto other cores on multi-core systems, but it is so minor that its barely noticeable; end turn processing all seems to happen on a single core. A single-core system with Civ V with a higher clock speed (higher GHz) will have faster turn processing than a multi-core system, as was found by gamespot. Elemental, unfortunately, does not seem to take any advantage of multi-core, but its simultaneous turn processing is definitely an impressive strength from Stardock the "David" versus Firaxis the "goliath."
