Question about time between turns?

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

I don't know if it's just my computer but is it normal with 5 day increments to take a minute or more to process. I'm about seven years into my campaign and I have yet to even start exploring my neighbouring systems in a conventional start.

I can generally generate several five day steps before the game interrupts and according to the log it does five day calculations so it's not that I get many small steps or anything. Is there anything I can do to make it go faster?

[nafaho7]

In order to allow Time Steps and Build Cycles to process more quickly, you need to minimize the number of calculations to make.  Several common ways to do this are:
Turn OFF orbital motion for planets and asteroids.
Start the game with ZERO Non-Player Races.

As time goes on, and more and more of the galaxy is explored and generated, the amount of processing required for a given build cycle will grow, despite your best efforts.  It is my understanding that this provides many players with their "Game Over" condition; when turns take an unbearable amount of time to process, it is time to scrap the present game and start a new one.

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

I don't have asteroid orbits on but planets and moons are on... thing is that I have hardly even started this game, I have not explored one single system but Sol and I'm down to a crawl at 1min 30sek or so for a five day cycle. I hardly have any ships either...

[Theokrat]

Things that are very commonly causing slowdowns are 1) large number of civilian shipping lines, and 2) a lot of sensor checks.

Cant do much about 1), except desinging large civilian ships only, handing out no subsidaries and few contracts.

2) can happen if a NPR stumbles upon an occupied system, say with a listening post. The game checks if anyone can see each other every 5s, so 5 day turns can take a while. Annyoing when they dont see each other for a while (and cant thus fight it out)

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

Ok, I have browsed the forum for some more tip... I have now restarted a new campaign. The problem that I had before were clearly too man NPR that were active in the background.

I started a conventional start but modded me into a very early Newtonian age to sort of get my empire running. I more or less advanced my empire about ten to fifteen years from a conventional start position. Sol is pretty much explored and the first Explorer ships is rolling of the production line who will take humanity into the stars and beyond. My tech are now around nuclear pulse engines and about that tech level in the more important areas of technology.

I set it so that I had one NPR from the start but there is now only an 8% chance for any other to spawn so they should not become too common, I limited the number of systems to 300 (plenty enough I guess). When the game do start to slow down I hope that I have such a sprawling empire that there are so much to do between turns anyway that the slowdown will not be such a pain. 

[andrea69]

I think 8% is too low. At the beginning the game is interesting anyway, but I'm afraid if in the long run you find out there isn't anybody out there, playing will become boring.
I'm playing with 25%, explored 8 systems, and still haven't found anything, just empty space.

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

I realized that too, I upped it to 15% after I wrote that... I have seen two enemies within the first five years of the game. I think it really is random, sometimes you find someone other times you won't.