My Game Is Slow

[FormerFishFarmer]

It's really starting to get annoying. Like it is trying to simulate the load on an ancient computer. Any way to speed it up? Taking several minutes after you hit the 'Next' key is no fun. And I haven't even met any other wizards yet.

[Seravy]

Edit dosboxmom.conf and set core=dynamic and depending on your computer, cycles somewhere between 100000 and 250000.
In theory those should be already the default settings but I noticed the GoG installer creates start menu icons that don't use the configuration file.
Alternately there are hotkeys for Dosbox to raise speed while playing. Speed is CTRL-F11, CTRL-F12 and ALT-F12.
Unfortunately Dosbox's default emulation speed without using a configuration file is a mere 3000 cycles which is ridiculously outdated.

[FormerFishFarmer]

Thanks for the tip.

[FormerFishFarmer]

I tried all that and none of it worked, but thank you for all your sugestions, anyway. I learned quite a bit about ediditng the Config. file of the game.
The problem seems to be that, late in the game, my opponents just have so much going on in terms of Units and Cities that it bogs the game down, no matter what you do to it.
I set the Land Size to Fair and Number Of Opponents to One and it seems to work fine now. It's a shame, as the large explorable lands and multiple opponents were a real part of the draw of this game for me.

[Seravy]

Yes, that's unfortunately true although it was never so bad for me that I had to reduce opponents or map sizes. Even the worse case scenario of 4 opponents with the global unit cap maxed averaged at around 90-120 seconds with peaks of 3 minutes on the first few turns of a major war breaking out. I believe that was on my previous computer too, which was only half as powerful as the current one in emulated CPU cycles. Still, having to wait for over a minute can be slightly boring.
As explained here, sadly, it can't be any faster than this : https://steamcommunity.com/app/1146370/discussions/0/1744520920057020752/
Turning enemy moves off if you haven't already helps a little. Going to war and killing the AI's units helps a lot. (and it also makes them attack you so actually get to play during their turn.)
In general the slow turn times are a result of units piling up when at least one major player had no wars for a prolonged period of time and thus their units keep piling up and never die.

My personal experience with playing games on the Huge map size is that is can take an eternity not due to AI turn times but because it simply takes forever to conquer all that stuff, kill all those units, manage all the armies needed to so and so on. AI turn times were slow but my own turns were several times as long, and battles were like 10 times as much. Certainly the turn times are a problem but having to fight all those units is worse.
I never really had problems with the number of opponents though - it does not make much difference if those 1400 tiles of land belong to a single player or are split between 4 of them assuming the game does reach that phase and I don't eliminate that one enemy early.