Speeding up the game and other questions

[Tigerhunter (OP)]

I'm on a Mac, and an old one at that.  I play on a virtual machine running Windows XP.  Aurora isn't unplayable, exactly, but the level of waiting involved is a real drag; I can only imagine that things will get even worse in the end game.   

Current specs for the virtual machine are 2400 MB RAM and both CPUs.  I can bump up the RAM some more, but VirtualBox recommends against that.  Which of the two is the limiting factor? Is there anything else I can do/enable/download to speed the game up? (I've read the page on Game Slowdown and have done all the general stuff like defragmenting. ) Specs: https://imgur. com/sfrh9JH

While I'm here:

Jump gates I build are orange.  I've encountered a few jump gates that are red, what does that indicate?

Is there a "make a noise when auto-turns is done running" setting?

Can sensors on one side of a jump point sense things on the other side?

Why does editing my post add extra spaces after all the periods?

Thanks in advance. 

[NihilRex]

Aurora only uses 1 CPU core.  HD access speed is a big thing.

Red Gates are ones you didn't build.

Not that I know of.

No.

No clue.

[Cheet4h]

While I only had small games, spanning ~30 years and noticing no change in various 30day cycles between running it on an SSD or on my HDD, I can imagine that HDD speed is the limiting factor due to the need to change the database after every turn. You could probably also speed up turn times if you set hyperthreading to "off", if your Mac has that.

Editing and periods: I think it's because the forum restricts new users from posting direct links. Easiest way to do that is to put periods after dots. Links will not be automatically be shown as links and search engine crawler bots, like Google's, won't notice these, so no pagerank bump from posting spam on this forum.

[Rich.h]

Will locking Aurora to one core on windows machines help in any real way?

[NihilRex]

No, but if your system has hyperthreading activated in the BIOS, some people have reported that disabling it has caused an improvement,

[xeryon]

Hard drive access is a huge factor for Aurora.  Apple liked to install 5400 RPM hard drives in all their portables until very recently and in a lot of desktops (imacs) until about 2011 or so.  They pushed quiet operation and battery life over performance.  After 2011 all imac have 7200 RPM  or SSD drives in them regardless of model or options.  Portables skipped 7200 RPM and just went to SSD/flash media.

[Rich.h]

I'm already running an ssd and using 16gb ram. Will turning off hyperthreading make any realistic change or would it be a case of measuring the difference with a stopwatch?

[Jorgen_CAB]

Removing Hyper Threading gave me about 10-15% increase in boost on my work PC where I often have it enabled.

For the record... "Hyper Threading" is bad for most games in general. Hyper threading is great for load balancing your CPU when it is multi tasking, such as running virtual OS or you run many thing on your PC at the same time. For a single application hyper threading is generally giving you less performance overall... I have worked with this and tested it many times.

[Tigerhunter (OP)]

Thanks for the advice, everyone. 

[andrea69]

In my experience, the only way to make Aurora playable for many in-game years is not in fine tuning your machine, but in tuning Aurora.
Don't enable the Invaders when you start a campaign and, possibly, play with no NPR, they will be generated automatically in any case, while you explore the galaxy. If you want more races to compete, manage them yourself. Up to three it's manageable. Other things that come to my mind are keeping the galaxy size to a reasonable level, and trying to avoid fast growth of the shipping lines; don't subsidize them. Disabling asteroids orbits also helps.

[MarcAFK]

If you want maximum performance from aurora you should disable NPR generation, star swarm, and precursor generation except for when you explore systems yourself. Ideally only select 1 NPR To prevent NPR conflict, but you should be ok with a few NPR's as long as you don't leave on NPR/swarm/precursor generation while they explore, at least untill they go to war with each other.

To speed up your own experience I recommend doing things on a monthly basis, very minute micromanagement will take longer. Also you should try to tolerate some waste/ inefficiency every so often.
For instance queue construction projects in large batches with a low % dedicated to it, to reduce the time you spend on changing production. Let the buildings build up for a while before issuing orders to transport them.
You should still allow the game to run in 5 day increments because I think it helps the civilians organise trade runs.
Set every planet you have which has a large enough population to "stable population", this will prevent civilian colony ships from sucking half a million people from earth for your colony on luna which has only room for 50,000.