Is anyone else having game-killing problems with turn increment slowdown?

[Polestar (OP)]

Howdy all,

Who else is discovering that Aurora slows down really badly after a while of play? To unplayably slow? I've tried all sorts of different starting settings, especially limiting non-player entities and the number of systems, but even in in my current game where I dropped the first to 1 and the second to 20, Aurora is currently taking about 90s to process each time increment of five days; a 1 hour game increment takes 20s.

That's not per turn. That's per increment. It takes an awful lot of increments to get through a battle or build an economy. I just pressed the "auto turns button", clicked a time increment button ... and the game has gone unresponsive for long enough for me to take a walk. No enemy fleets involved either.

Is there a fix that lets me play against opposition and keeps my game running smoothly, or am I just SOOL? I'm used to games being reasonably interactive, but this is reminding me of play by mail.

What's more, every single game I've ever played on Aurora has suffered the same fate: Just when my empire starts getting interesting, advancing the clock gets unbearably tedious.

My computer has an Intel i5 750 quad-core CPU and runs high-end productivity software and most games just fine.

What's your experience?

[sublight]

How many years do your games usually run?

Usually I get bored and start a new game with a new theme after 20-50 years before that becomes an unplayable problem, but heat death is one of the leading causes of abandoned games for my multifaction starts. I play on an old core 2-duo laptop.

[Jorgen_CAB]

There has been allot of information on the forum to explain and how to deal with some of these problems.

One thing is to play the game small, start with less than 500m people per faction. One current problem is yours and the NPRs civilian fleets. This make civilian fleets grow too large and the larger yours and NPRs populations are the more wealth there are and even more civilian ships will be created.

Currently old civilian ships is not replaced properly (supposedly fixed in 6.4) and in 6.4 Steve will have civilians build bigger ships and more emphasis on bigger ships. These two issues will most probably solve many problems as you describe. Large empires with billions of people will still build lots and lots of civilian ships so don't subsidize them too much.

Another solution in battles is to use SM and activate time bubble in that system, this means that time is frozen in all other systems but the one you are fighting in. This is usually not a problem since ship combat usually only take a few hours at most, a day or two at worst.

You can also turn of the sensor calculation in system where you know there are lots and lots of civilian traffic, just make sure you can detect an enemy before they reach that system.

The thing that increases your performance in this game is a really fast hard-drive (try two or more striped SSD disks) where access and read ability is the most important. Almost all data is directly stored into the database instead of memory. I think it is a safety measure for the game crashing. Multi-Core is useless but CPU power and fast RAM will help with sensor calculations, ship and object pathing.