Ok I reckon I've clocked up about 20 hours on this game over the last three nights, it's tough as nails to learn but thanks to the tutorials and the very helpful members of this forum I'm slowly learning the ropes and really enjoying the game however one thing is causing me great annoyance - the turn times, frankly they simply don't work.
According to the game pop-up tips and a post I read somewhere on this forum if you input a number of turns into the Min Inc box (say 6), tick the Auto Turns box and then press 30 days the game should spin on six months regardless of what happens in the game world however that's not what happens. Sometimes that will happen but what normally seems to happen is that the game will just spin on exactly how it wants to and sometimes it will literally enter into a cycle of dozens of 5 second intervals and seriously you can't play a game like this in 5 second bursts it just isn't feasible.
I read somewhere that this is caused by AI factions fighting each other but why? the pop-up tip says that NOTHING can stop the turns regardless of the interrupts so why do non-human factions affect it?, if this can't be worked around then can you not just simply put an option into the events screen that allows you to switch off notifications of non-human faction actions? you seem to be able to enable and disable pretty much every human notification but there isn't one for non-human actions and that really slows the game down to a crawl
I wanted to experiment with terraforming so Ignored everything except what my terraforming plants were doing to the Martian atmosphere and just set the game on multiple 30 day turns but hours and hours of real life time later I'm still only some 6 years into the game from where I was when I started tonight's session because it's constantly throwing 5 second turns in with the mix of 30 days ones sigh.
Apart from this one niggle I can't find a single other thing about the game I don't like and it's simply amazing how much detail and creative options the designer has managed to fit into the game