Hopefully this gets through now. The forum sometimes doesn't accept certain words, but only when they come after other certain words. There is no way to identify the rule behind this, so I will just black out words that the forum does not accept, so you will have to guess sometimes what should be there. See it as a game.
Could you elaborate a little more on this? The eventual slowdown of the game is starting to get to me
Well, aside
*black* the only recently discovered processor trick, I've gotten my speeds by making sensible cuts to the game, which probably a lot of people wouldn't go with, since it might take away too much from their play-style. I've tested multiple theories for this to figure out what actually causes slowdown in later game stages, because it could be many things: Count of moving objects (ships, planets etc.), Count of total systems (there might be a calculation routine for every one of the, causing degrading the more you have), Count of officers, number of active sensors in the galaxy (seemed likely to be a calculation maelstrom), amount of accumulated resources (incl. fuel), Count of outpost(/colonized) worlds (again, seems likely to demand an extra calculation each).
By rigorous testing through my long past 2nd and 3rd Aurora game, I could rule out the following as being basically of no influence for production turn speed:
Resource amount, thankfully the count of found star systems, and surprisingly also the count of outposts. -Maybe that gets worse if you really overdo it, but I never experienced any frowning problems up to 30 settlements or what not, including around 8 1billion+ inhabited worlds. The only thing that happens is actually that
big, not many colonies slow down the loading when selecting such a colony in the production window. This is however not due to bare size, but because of a surprise guest on the list of possible factors: ground units. Having more ground units on a colony significantly slows down the load-on-selection time. It starts to get annoying around 6 divisions, and with 10 it is becoming a problem.
...Can be avoided by putting them in cryo-modules until they are needed though, and suddenly the biggest colonies run nearly at 100% speed again. This is of course of utmost importance for your main colony to have (the others not too much), because the biggest one sits on top, and gets thus loaded when you summon up either production, research or economics windows, slowing that down by a lot. If you herd your ground forces adequately, you may load almost as on day one though.
So what stayed as factors are: officer count, sensor count, count of moving objects.
Officer count you will only notice at two moments: Whenever an assignment cycle is through (happens normally once a year or so, unless you change it), because then elaborate calculations determine where every officer goes on for the next assignment cycle, who is fired, and then some promotions happen too. Of course this becomes more demanding the more officers you have, but it is only once in a what time, and even then not as bad.
What I found is more of a problem is that the officer menu slows down quite a lot once you have around 500 in naval only, and that may become a problem. I've learned through this to not go over 20 naval academies if possible, because on that stage it already needs a few seconds on every window summoning.(this already gives potential for over 1000 naval officers, so unless one sports expansive fighter fleets, it should be enough for a long time)
This isn't really necessary though if one doesn't bother with selection loading time. I may break my own limitation in my most recent game later one for example, if I really go into megaton carriers and need lots of fighters.
Sensor Count I could not fully nail down to determine just how much it does, because you basically need a hostile NPR to test this out. I can confirm general slowdown for sure (does not extra influence production turns however), but if it may become really crippling if you let the NPR around,..I could not sort out individually. This is because I deal with any NPR I encounter quickly, and do not let them leave their system for exploration, because of the last and most important factor:
Moving objects. The one and only absolutely deciding factor in any game's pace are the amount of objects that fly through your game. This does not only include your and any possible NPR or whatever ships, but also most notably the civil fleets, and the orbiting bodies in systems.
- Orbiting bodies can be avoided by turning that option of in the game menu, though I must confess I am not sure on how strong it actually influences, because I never tested it separately (difficult to do), and had it turned of ever since after my 2nd game. Some people might find it breaks some important atmosphere with the realistic body motion turned off, and I can understand that. I just saw the potential that this may slow down the game with pretty much every newly discovered system, even if there is not much living in it, so a game would naturally slow down through exploration alone, and I didn't want to take the risk. I always play usability before presentation.
- Your own ships you can of course easily have under control, but NPR might spawn fast after being discovered. In one older thread here I presented that I played as the Warhammer 40k human empire, because I noticed that the only sensible philosophy towards aliens is to violently exterminate them before they can spread. Even small NPR start spawning ships
fast very soon, and then they start flying through jump points and discover worlds you have not seen yet (including even more NPR possibly about which you can do nothing - exponential slowdown trap). This might then cause the feared 'distant battle' slowdown, where you really cannot do much but watch 5 second intervals for some hours, because your master yoghurt senses a disturbance in the force. This is so threatening, because you never know if the game didn't possibly bug out, and those turns will never end. No joking, I once in my second game had a period of those slowdowns that lasted more than 10 hours. I watched the entire alien trilogy, then reviews on every movie of the trilogy, then parodies, all in that time, and it wasn't even nearly finished. They ended, but I decided I would never deal with this ever again, turned NPR on new games off by default, so that I can only find them, and if I do... Exterminatus!
Well, I have relativized that decision a bit since, and allow them to live in controlled environment peacefully with me, but I prepare measures to hinder them from leaving their origin, or grow too fast. ("..uhhh, no, this ship was infested by some ancient long extinct empire's AI virus, switched sides, and now goes rampage destroying your fresh jump fleet. Well, we couldn't have known.")
Once they are allies, and one can see all their ships and position, one might let them roam around even more freely, but always beware of letting them discover new systems still, because in the end they are just armed civil fleets with the same problems...
- Keeping you civil fleet under control is an absolute must. Many good things happened to the civil fleet management since 6.3, so it might now be feasible to have one without completely breaking your game on year 100, but you must always be knowing how to treat those to prevent disastrous multiplication. (for example you do not move infrastructure to venus, or else your civils will at first go filthily rich with that, becoming too many easily, and then also only ever to those jobs and not help you out with whatever you really need. All in all it is pretty easy to mess up your game with some AI trap or miscalculation, and it definitely costs you some processor resources in any case for those hundreds of ships to individually figure out where to go on every increment)
The most problematic thing about civils is that they can get out of control still, because there is no way to restrict their growth or even scrap them by empire decisions. In 6.4 they update their design efficiently, and scrap ships after some intended life time by themselves, so that does help out preventing this terrible exponential explosion. There is no guarantee though if you overlook something, and so you still often see threads on the forum where people got their games crippled to backwards time compression because of civil fleets with hundreds of ships in eternal meaningless transit.
A side problem is of course too that these ships might also get intercepted again, so there is potential for a lesser case of the 'distant-battle' slow down. You see them, but it will be a long encounter (a whole freighter trail), about which you can do nothing.
In 6.3 I had concluded civil is impossible to bear, and yes, it turned out to be basically the only most responsible factor of game slowdowns for later years, as when