Feature Request: Adjusting gamespeed during an active game

[MattPilot]

I was just watching the latest video and i got an idea. Soren (?) talked about speeding the game up as an option (i think there are 3 settings, right?), to finish games quicker.

Well, how about being able to adjust the gamespeed during the game itself? What if there is this special age period you like and would like to spend a few more turns in that age?

Press a few buttons and slow the game down. The result would be that workers work slower, you get less hammers (shields) per turn, less of everything. Science points accumulate slower & so does culture and everything else. All you get by slowing down the game is more turns to move units around - say to wage war. All players would be equally affected by this, of course.

So if you were to slow the game down enough, you could play 10 turns that would accumulate the same science/hammer/money etc... points as 1 turn during normal speed would do. the bonus is you got 10 turns to move units around instead of 1. This lets you drag out your favorite ages.


Now what if you really hate an age or time period, and/or are currently are not at war with anyone. You could speed up the game. So if you speed the game up fast enough, you could complete 1 turn and get the same benefits as 5 or 10 turns.


How would this work from a practical standpoint? Well, you could have gamespeed in terms of %. 100% being normal gamespeed. Slow or increase the game speed by 1/2 increaments. The gamespeed % would be included in the code as a modifier for all other aspects of the game. So if we slow the game to have 3 turns instead of 1, we would be playing at 33% (2 turns is 50% and 4 turns is 25%, 10 turns is 10%). This 33% gamespeed would then tell the game to only give you 33% of the hammers/money/science you would normally get per turn.


I guess the main reason to slow down the game is to wage war and the main reason to speed up a game is if you are at peace and have nothing to do.

What do you all think of this idea?

[Solver]

It would absolutely break the game balance and cause more problems than you could imagine.

If you're at peace, you don't have to move your armies and attack, so turns take shorter anyway. If you're at war, turns can easily take 15 minutes while you do everything. It's always been that way, so the game pace actually changes depending on the situation!

But imagine the game breaking issues if you have a city with 20 shields per turn, suddenly you slow down, and have 5 shields, and the city now takes 15 turns to produce a unit.

[curtsibling]

Differing time rates would be insane on so many levels...

[Kuciwalker]

I like the idea, actually, of being able to switch between modes mid-game. I don't think it should be triggered as an in-game thing (at least in stock), but the option would be really cool.

It would also allow for you to, say, rush through the first three ages to the modern age and then finish out the game at a leisurely pace. Much better than starting in the modern age, because this way the development stays in the normal order.

[sophist]

If differing time rates are well-balanced in the game, it doesn't seem like switching rates during a game would necessarily unbalance it. I'm sure there are ways the player could game it so that it happened at maximum advantage to the player as opposed to the AI, but that seems like a long way to go for relatively little benefit, and it's relatively easily solved by only allowing this to happen, say, every 20th turn or something.

[Vince278]

Wouldn't you have to sacrifice AI to speed up a game? That extra time has to come from somewhere.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by sophist
If differing time rates are well-balanced in the game, it doesn't seem like switching rates during a game would necessarily unbalance it. I'm sure there are ways the player could game it so that it happened at maximum advantage to the player as opposed to the AI, but that seems like a long way to go for relatively little benefit, and it's relatively easily solved by only allowing this to happen, say, every 20th turn or something.

Or, as I said, not making it an in-game thing. Then it doesn't have to be balanced.

[sophist]

Yeah, lots of things don't have to be balanced if you don't do them. Being able to do this would make it easier to find balance bugs, though.

[Kuciwalker]

No, I meant don't make it some sort of game action like founding a city, but rather make it a preference you can set.

[MattPilot]

I was more thinking along the lines of hitting either the + or - key on the numpad.

Maybe only have 1 or 2 preset levels of speeds. Instead of going from year to year, it goes from month to month, and until that year is finished, you can't go back to the normal speed setting. This way, nothing would be lost do to rounding.


This feature would really only be useful in wars. Would you like to play WW2 in 6 turns, or in 72 turns (6years * 12 months).

The main purpose would be to have a war with the technologies available at the time of the war. Nothing i hate more than starting a war and having my 'newest' units that just reached the front line be obsolete by the time they get there.


Also, since production would also be slowed down, the player/enemy would have to rely more on DRAFTING soldiers from the population than building units, since it would take more turns to build the same unit, than it would in a normal gamespeed.

[Solver]

And when you slow your time in a war just that, production slows down. Yet your units can march through enemy lands just as fast, only now they can conquer half the enemy empire before he can produce a single unit even due to slower production.

[Kuciwalker]

I don't like the idea of timescale changing during a war, though, because then it has to change for everyone, and I don't want to be stuck going slowly for a thousand years because of a war between two civs who can't even reach each other and won't make peace.

[sophist]

I don't think anyone intends the AI to have this capability. It would make sense to eliminate this from multiplayer games.

[Kuciwalker]

It's kind of hard to balance to have the entire gameplay change, but only in human wars. Plus, what happens when the human enters an already-occuring AI war.

[sophist]

The game speed would be adjusted globally, but only the human player controls it.