Game slowdown

[Klasanov]

I'm playing a huge cluster, and am noticing a big slowdown in the later stages of the game, where every empire has about 50+ planets or so. It's frustrating enough to make the game unplayable for me. Which I hate, even though I'm on easy, the AI is nice enough to provide me with a good challenge... Maybe I just suck.

I don't want to play on smaller galaxies, honestly. I'm claustrophobic in such games, it's the same in Civ III. Give me epic, but not epic turn waits.

Is there a way to get the game to speed up the turn processing with the v1.25 patch? It tends to hang on ground combat when there are no ground combats to take care of. I heard that might be a bug.

Is an effective way of getting rid of this slowdown to revert to the original version, and just DL some mods to fix PDs and make it so the AI actually builds warships, rather than keeps 1 scout ship for defense thinking it's gonna take down a stack of 3 behemoth class warships singlehandedly?

[Stormhound]

In short, no. My "inside opinion" is that the game slows down more as more worlds are controlled by the human player in SP. I think there's a slight effect for worlds controlled by anyone, but it seems more pronounced as the human player takes over. I suppose that if you were to forego colonizing marginal worlds, and that you bombed the snot out of the enemy instead of invading, that things would go faster...but where the heck is the fun in that?

Also, the slowdown was there in the original version, so reverting wouldn't do any good anyhow.

[Klasanov]

Well, that sucks. Sure. I could bombard the AI into oblivion, but then someone else would colonize. And isn't the whole purpose of war to expand your power? It is for me, which is why I was invading planets and stuff. You know, I get more votes for the senate that way, and more industrial strength.

QSI should fix it so there is no game slowdown, or very little, if it's possible. If Atari doesn't want a new patch, they should at least release the coptyrights to QSI, if they don't care about the game anymore.

[Whoha]

Would disabling planet to planet migration effect turn speed?

[Klasanov]

How do you disable planet migration?

And wouldn't that make the Ithkul worth invading?

[Whoha]

I'd assume that only the programmers could do it, but I seem to recall a mod that changed the % chance for migration of each race, hmm ill have to look into that.

[Stormhound]

You could effectively disable the bulk of planet to planet migration through a mod...the first table in Population.txt has a list of StayPercentages that could be tweaked, and the other tables might have an effect too. I don't know how profound an effect the migration would have, as you have all the planetary economic decisions chewing up time as well, and I'm rather fond of the migration myself, but if you want to try it, more power to you.

[Whoha]

Yea I like migration to, also I haven't gotten to a point where turns are taking forever, but when I get there that will be something I try.

[Klasanov]

Well, disabling it through a mod would still keep the calculation in place. So ti'd be no use.

[Stormhound]

Not entirely true. You see, if nobody's migrating, then the program doesn't have to figure out where they're going.

The problem with no migration, though, is that planets may not fill up very well.

[Klasanov]

ah. Interesting.