Ok, I seriously have to lose a word about how the pacing in Aurora performs. I have no problem with the general idea of those self chosen units with their subunits within. Also the overall game progression speed -though maybe too slow for the casual gamer- is fully satisfying for a veteran 4x gamer I think. So far no trouble with the basic setup.
The difficulties however arise with that also other races and their 'whatever' battles with swarms or remnant are also allowed to slow the increments down. I know there is reason to do so, as you would have to decrease the subintervals to around 10 seconds anyway in ship battles, but that doesn't take the issue away. Right now it all too often happens that you face a period of non progression, where you sit in front of the computer doing nothing for half an hour, because some NPRs you wont see in another 1000 game hours are duking it out somewhere in the galaxy. ("Wait! I feel a disturbance in the force!" or whatever) So far I could shrug it off, because it would eventually subside, but today, and until now, I faced a geanourmours delay of over 6 and a half hours already. . . . Is this serious? I watched the first Alien movie, then Alien:Resurrection, then a 20 minute Review about Alien:Resurrection, then went taking a shower, and when I came back, it still is calculating the time progression in 10 seconds intervals! (with a day interval coming around every 30 minutes or so) This is no overstating or drama, no, this actually happened and is happening to this very minute. The ventilation of my laptop always switches to full and noisy power whenever I do multiple turns after another due to the intense computing, and for nearly 7 hours it did not stop that anymore. I would show you a printout of the event log that cannot capture more than around 2200 messages, but I can assure you that almost none of them is white, and instead nearly all grey 10 seconds intervall messages. . . And it would be more if the memory was larger. (did I mention that very long slowdowns forshadowed this event. slowdowns of that kind that I easily watched a 1:30 hours Ultima 9 retrospective before that with the most time spent on calculation?)
This is serious "it's not a bug, but a feature!"-buisness right here. How can one expect of anyone, even hardcore genre fans, to deal with such time draining foibles? I know it could be a coincidence and my bad luck, since I see other people getting further than me, and still enjoying progress, but that doesn't take away that you can easily get death-trapped at any moment by a never ending crawl. What is that? - Not only can bugs crash your game beyond repair, because there is no rollback functionality intended (and unwisely for a construct like this: no debug either), but now the very game mechanics itself, the "how it should be" can destroy your game too? The bugs I could now navigate around through the useful remote saving tool (not in the game, even though it should be top priority urgent imho), and, well, bugs may be fixed sometime, but how can you ever deny the game itself if it posses inherent tendencies to just be non functional in this setup?
I plead for measures here. Something needs to be done about these 'invisible wars'. If there would be a function that just rushes their battle calculations, draws like a few minutes together through average estimation or whatever, it shall be so. I honestly don't care if the invisible battles are done super-exactly or not. And I would chose functionality, . . no: usability over exact mechanic any time night and day.
I am sure others must have made some similar experiences at some point. Or is there even a way around this that I don't know of, and all this was for nothing?
P. S. : I forgot to mention that I didn't go crazy about the starting races or whatever. Actually they should be pretty flat, since even so I enabled two rivaling empires instead of the standard 1, I set gaming difficulty to 20%, so they shouldn't really be able to produce this much hazzle so early. Also the invaders are turned off, and the NPR spawn is on standard 30%. Nothing suspicious here, nu uh.