Out of interest, how long did a Colonial Wars construction increment as a whole typically take in VB6?

Orbital movement is done by calculating the change in bearing based on orbital period and passage of time and recalculates the new location based on distance and bearing from the sStar. What takes time is loading and saving from the DB and checking for orbiting fleets, etc.

For C# Aurora, there is no loading or saving during turn execution and fleets are flagged as requiring orbital movement when they enter orbit. I checked my current campaign (with 500 systems and 60,000 system bodies) and with asteroid orbits on, orbital movement dropped from three minutes to 0.1 seconds.

I like it, I assume your plan when you suspect hostilities are happening is to turn off it's sensor and move it to safety once you have ID'd the enemy and gotten them into sensor coverage of your main fleet, with that sensor range on the SEW ship that should be doable though i suppose it might require a little micromanagement on your part.

I am on the fence about it's armament though, that is enough to engage a couple gunboats or a lone missile ship successfully, but how often is it going to be in a position to have to fight at all? if it's sensor is off it won't be a high priority target for the AI, and if it is on you should be able to see stuff coming long before it becomes a threat. I suppose it can thicken AMM defense when it rejoins the fleet, but I also assume your fleet will have sufficient AMM on it's own. I'd probably skip weapons altogether in favor of either more armor or just a small, faster ship.

I am curious how the locations of the planets and other orbiting objects are calculated under the hood.

I suspect (but could be wrong) that you are calculating X/Y locations for every object every time you hit the 5 day cycle.  I suspect this is the case just by the amount of churn which hits every 5 days and how it drastically increases as the game goes on.

If this is the case, I would humbly suggest you consider looking into changing the calculation process to using a modified orbital elements method of storing the location.

https://en. m. wikipedia. org/wiki/Orbital_elements

Because the game is two dimensional and you dont simulate orbital eccentricity, you could use semi major axis, starting true (or mean) anomaly, the amount of delta mean anomaly per 5 day period, and the date to store all X/Y information.  The only variable which changes per pulse is the date.  Then, you would only need to convert to X&Y if the player is looking at a specific system or if a player or NPR has a ship with orders to go to the orbital body.

I suspect this would significantly increase turn processing time.

Thanks

In earlier versions, you needed five jump gate components to build a jump gate. They were built in factories, moved to the jump gate by freighter and assembled by construction ship.

The component requirement was removed with general player consensus that it was tedious and didn't add to game play. What remained was the construction ship and the current system. I don't want to go down a similar path to one that was already tested and rejected.