Tricks to have viable processing time for multiple-NPR start?

[vorpal+5 (OP)]

Hey,

So I set up a multi-NPR start in Sol system.  I run Aurora on a SSD and also tried on a ramdisk, no difference in performance btw.

I had set up 8 nations in Sol, my player nation and 7 Human NPRs.  For reference Terran Federation (me), Russia, China, USA, India, Arab League, Latin Alliance, Japanese Coprosperity and United Nations (non playing, for pop only).  This is obviously heavily inspired by one of Steve's fiction, Solarian empires.  All nations have a colony on Earth and most have 1-2 colonies on the Solar system, except UN which is there only to provide pop.  There is a truce clock of 20 years.  TF is supposed to be the spiritual child of European Union mixed with some Western World country.

Then I proceeded to run one day (backing up the DB each time).  So far result has not been that great, time-wise:

TF and China: 3 secs
TF, China, USA: 10 secs
TF, China, USA, Russia: 23 secs
TF, China, USA, Russia, try two: 22 secs
RAMDisk - TF, China, USA, Russia: 21 secs
TF, China, USA, Russia, UN: 37 secs
TF, China, USA, Russia, India: 49 secs
TF, China, USA, Russia, India, Japan: 70 secs
Everyone: roughly ~~ 10 mn

My conclusion is that at best I can afford playing with 4 nations (TF, China, USA, Russia), as 23 seconds for a day is already quite much and I guess it will inflate to several minutes as game grows.

So, and that will be my question, how people like Steve manage to run 14 NPRs at once! Given the exponential time processing, running even a single day for 14 NPRs in the same system would take perhaps a full (real world) day to be processed!
I'm curious.  As much as I would like to play with a more elaborate setting, where the various blocks of power from Earth expand in the Sol system and beyond, it seems that practically the setting is not viable.

[MarcAFK]

If your computer can't handle it you might need to turn sensors off in sol. At least it'll stop the system being turned into a blood bath.
I find if you're playing a game with very heavy urn processing it's best to setup a second monitor and run turns while doing other things.

[vorpal+5 (OP)]

Good point, it can definitively help until there is an hostile.  And I can enable it from time to time.  Are you surprised by the processing time I indicate? My computer is not top-notch but not that old either, and I doubt that Steve with his 14-NPRs after action report can run a day under one hour.

Has anyone tried to lease computer processing power? Amazon Web Service has a free offer on that, through cloud computing.  It seems intriguing to me.

[MarcAFK]

I doubt that would help. The bottleneck with aurora is database accessing rather than actual computation time. The Overhead from sending the data out would take just as long.

[Steve Walmsley]

The sensor slowdown is multiplied exponentially with multiple races in the same system. So 2 checks with only 2 races, 6 checks for 3 races, 12 for 4 races. up to 182 checks for 14 races.

When running a campaign with lots of races in VB6 Aurora, I usually disable sensors in Sol. I turn them on when there is a chance of conflict and accept the really slow turns.

Even in C# Aurora, there is still a significant increase in execution time when a lot of races are in the same system. For example, if I run a 5-second increment in my current campaign (23 races, 14 of which are in Sol) with sensors disabled in Sol, the sensor phase takes about 0.17 seconds. When I turn sensors in Sol back on, the sensor phase is 3.7 seconds while all the new contacts are created. This drops to about 1.8 seconds for subsequent 5-second increments because now contacts are only being updated, rather than created.

However, even though there is a noticeable increase in execution time, this is so much faster than VB6 Aurora that it isn't really a problem. Also, this is for a huge, well-developed game, tracking 8,000 contacts without Sol and 16,000 contacts including Sol. The vast majority of games won't have so many races in close proximity.

[vorpal+5 (OP)]

Thanks for the detailed answers 

[Garfunkel]

Also, by keeping sensors disabled in Sol, you avoid NPR relations going as far into red as possible before the truce clock expires. If they all hate each other already, the moment the truce clock runs out, there will be a massive free-for-all war between them since NPRs don't do diplomacy. You can avoid joining in by placing diplomatic teams with all of them. However, if they can't see contacts in their homesystem, then they won't get the relations hit and might be somewhat close to neutral still when the 20 years has passed.

[MarcAFK]

I roleplay the disabled sensors in sol as being the UN(or some other multinational entity) enforcing peace through total demilitarization of sol. Of course eventually when smeg hits the fan the UN looses it's power.