First off, please understand that this is not a complaint. I understand that this is a known issue, and, as I understand it, was one of the motivating factors for C# Aurora.
Having said that, I'm going to whine. Err…explain. The Corporate Federation campaign has been going for twenty years of game time, having started in January, 2125. To cover that game-time, I have had approximately 92 campaign-related posts, either story, maps, or ship designs. For most of that time I have been playing out events 1-2 years ahead of the events I post to the board. This allows me to catch and fix mistakes, and to, hopefully, tell a better story by building up events before they happen. Also, I tend to use the time Aurora takes while processing turns to write the stories and fill in the timeline. Unfortunately, Aurora is getting slower and slower.
Out of curiosity, this morning I timed a couple of Aurora turns, and found out that it is taking an average of 10 minutes to process a time advance (anything over around 3 hours will take at least this long). As there are an average of 4.7 time interrupts between five day economic turns, it is taking an average of 47 minutes per 5 day economic turn. Plus whatever time it takes me to issue orders to various fleets and keep R&D and construction going. As I said, I fill some of this time with writing, but there is still a lot of slack time to spend(waste).
I have filled this time with useful pursuits, such as re-watching "Legends of the Galactic Heroes", but the time it is taking to get anywhere is beginning to wear on me. I will finish this campaign, one way or another, but I've decided that I won't do another large-scale campaign in VB6 due to the time it takes to get things done. I may do some small campaigns, if I can come up with something interesting, or I may do a Starfire campaign. We'll see. I anticipate this campaign taking several more years to wrap up at this point, so it will be continuing for a while.
Kurt