How long does turn generation usually take?

[Jumpp (OP)]

I'm wondering if the update times I'm seeing are typical.  Here's a rough description of my current situation:

- I'm around 35 years into the game.
- I've got colonies in around half a dozen systems
- There are four civilian shipping lines
- I'm aware of four alien lifeforms that aren't me.  These are:

• Some pre-spaceflight people that I just conquered
• Those spoilers that show up near wrecks a lot, and sometimes make contact with engineer brigades
• Two spacefaring civilizations of unknown size, right next one another about five jumps from Sol, who are fighting a bitter war with one another.

- I've got around 40 warships organized into four fleets, half a dozen survey ships, three gate constructors, two colony ships, and around ten freighters operating in three different groups.

- I've got about 20 uninhabited mining colonies distributed among the systems in which I've got inhabited colonies, all flinging packets around

When I hit the button for a 5-day turn, it takes about 30 seconds on average.

Is this about what I should expect?  It's playable, and I'm having a great time, but I wonder sometimes if I've goofed something up and it's supposed to play faster than this.

[Jumpp (OP)]

I should add that I've explored maybe 80 systems or so.

[sublight]

Heat death is a known issue. Eventually the game slows down to an unplayable level and the player starts a new campaign. Primary causes are attributed to highly active shipping lines (now self limiting in 6.1) and inquisitive NPRs spawning additional inquisitive NPRs via exploration.  Setting the NPR generation chance to zero solves the latter issue at the cost of making space emptier.

My slowest game now takes me over 5 minutes to advance 5 days including interrupts and checking the event log to see if the reason for the interrupt was important. The longest 5-day increment I've ever seen lasted about an hour when an NPR or a spoiler race battle caused the game to use really small sub-increments while trying to calculate a missile intercept. I've only had 1 NPR battle like that, and I'm going to scrap the game if I ever see a 2nd.

Game statistics:
- 63 game years old
- 5 Player Race Factions, 3 with populations
- - 7 civilian shipping lines with nearly 200 ships total
- 3 starting NPRs, zero generation chance (1 has been conquered)
- 1 Spoiler option active at a time


Using Auto-turns with a minimum turn number set is a good way to help automate time if you don't mind having a delayed response time to any new event.

[clement]

If Generation Chance is set to 0%, will the 2 spoiler races that are on by default spawn in newly explored systems? Are they tied to a separate spawning mechanism?

[Erik L]

If Generation Chance is set to 0%, will the 2 spoiler races that are on by default spawn in newly explored systems? Are they tied to a separate spawning mechanism?

There are checkboxes to include or exclude the two spoilers on the game creation screen.

[Jumpp (OP)]

My slowest game now takes me over 5 minutes to advance 5 days...

Game statistics:
- 63 game years old
- 5 Player Race Factions, 3 with populations
- - 7 civilian shipping lines with nearly 200 ships total
- 3 starting NPRs, zero generation chance (1 has been conquered)
- 1 Spoiler option active at a time

Using Auto-turns with a minimum turn number set is a good way to help automate time if you don't mind having a delayed response time to any new event.

Do you happen to remember how many systems that universe has?

[sublight]

Let me count...
66 systems generated in total total of which 39 are known to one or more player factions. (It was a conventional start)


Edit:
My slow game is 5.6
I started the universe with a 60 system cap to force formation of an "inner core" and ensure everyone found each other, then expanded the system cap to 240 once I suspected everyone was probably jump connected.

Using a stopwatch tells me 5-day increment takes about 2 minutes. In the 20 days I ran with stopwatch in hand I only had 2 full 5-day increments pass without an interrupt.

[ollobrains]

what version are u using if i make ask 6.1.  Wondering if 6.2 that steve says is coming makes any small difference

[Nathan_]

Probably not.

As to Jumpp time how long a turn takes with orbits turned off, that can help. Not letting civs run wild helps. 5 days is the construction/planetary movement cycle, so that does some extra calculations. Likewise 5 day turns allow civilian fleets to grow like a virus, which doesn't help. But the bottom line is that this is a program written in VB that does a lot with a database on the harddrive, so efficiency isn't going to be its middle name.

[Jumpp (OP)]

"harddrive."

No kidding?  Given the size of the db, I imagined that it might reside in ram and just get flushed to disk from time to time.   (I'm a rendering guy, not a database guy, so I don't know if that's at all reasonable.)

This gives me an idea.  I've got an SSHD.  Maybe that'll help.

[Nathan_]

thats basically the way it works now, though let us know if you can do anything there. In addition to IO though are a lot of complicated calculations, the sensor model in particular is killer, which is why Steve included the option to turn it off when not needed.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Invaders are a problem, don't turn them on if you don't want to actually fight them. They end up scouting a lot of systems.

[sloanjh]

"harddrive."

No kidding?  Given the size of the db, I imagined that it might reside in ram and just get flushed to disk from time to time.   (I'm a rendering guy, not a database guy, so I don't know if that's at all reasonable.)

This gives me an idea.  I've got an SSHD.  Maybe that'll help.

Steve did a performance optimization a few years back that reads all the data from the DB into memory at the beginning of movement, executes the movement impulses in memory, then writes the results out just before returning control to the player at the end of movement.  So the SSD might help some, but probably not a lot....

John

[Steve Walmsley]

Invaders are a problem, don't turn them on if you don't want to actually fight them. They end up scouting a lot of systems.

They shouldn't do that any longer. There are strict limits on how many survey ships they can deploy

Steve