Time between Turns in Dom 6

[MayorMcWeed]

So I've just conducted a little test, both in Dom 5 and Dom 6, using the same mods, Sombre Warhammer and Oreida map (it's pretty big, like 1500 provinces or something) So went from in Dom 5 to time between ending a turn and beginning the next turn at around 5-6 minutes, this was tested in campaign with about 10 other AI Pretenders and having about 10 battles that I took part in, with thousands upon thousands of units being moved around and taking place in the combat.

Then in Dom 6 in a rather fresh Campaign with only about 8 pretenders (but on the same map) way less going on, maybe 2 or 3 battles happening per turn for me, the time came in just above 11 minutes for the time between ending a turn and beginning the next.

Start settings were the same in both campaigns as that's how I play (conquer all, not thrones)

Anyway just something I noticed, it would be better to test with no mods, but with mods is how I play.
I guess my question is if anyone else has noticed that DOM 6 has longer time between turns?

[Mormacil]

I think 1500 provinces isn't pretty big but actually extremely huge. That's a map big enough for a 100 players. You're really pushing the engine to it's limits here.

[Scrapulous]

Yes, it's pretty clearly slower in dom 6. I actually play dom 5 while I wait for dom 6 turns to resolve.

Of course battles are bigger in dom 6, with larger battlefields and more participants, and there are larger armies on the map, which I think may account for some of the difference.

[Nukular Power]

I've noticed myself that turn time seems way longer for some reason.

[Draken]

I mean, the amount of units has been buffed by a lot.
So that would mean longer battles.
Seems reasonable that the turns last longer then, right?

[DasaKamov]

I certainly wouldn't say "way longer", but turns are *somewhat* longer on my machine with Dom 6 - whereas turn-processing in Dominions 5 would take between 7-10 seconds in a medium-sized game, Dominions 6 takes between 8-12 seconds to process a turn.

As mentioned above, Dom 6 just has *much* more things going on "behind the scenes" than Dom 5 did (not just with larger armies, but also entirely new combat mechanics and spell paths), so it stands to reason.

[Nukular Power]

Originally posted by Draken:

I mean, the amount of units has been buffed by a lot.
So that would mean longer battles.
Seems reasonable that the turns last longer then, right?

It doesnt seem to be the battles for me; at least as far as I can tell they go by just as fast as they always did. Its more "global events' and etc phases seem to take a lot longer - though I havent done extensive testing

[Sombre]

Originally posted by Nukular Power:

It doesnt seem to be the battles for me; at least as far as I can tell they go by just as fast as they always did. Its more "global events' and etc phases seem to take a lot longer - though I havent done extensive testing

Worth noting that Sombre Warhammer contains a large number of fairly inefficient events. I wasn't really thinking of 1500 province maps when I made the mod. I know you may not be using the mod, but the OP apparently was.

[Chronia]

I don't think I've ever played an actual game with more than 150 provinces. Your stress test is an order of magnitude above that. I haven't noticed any performance issues with maps sized to 10 or so players.

[MayorMcWeed]

OK i went and checked and it's 1053 land provinces, and 172 sea provinces, so I may have exaggerated a little when I said 1500 provinces, but these long epic games are dope! I've pretty much exclusively played gargantuan maps since I was introduced to dominions with DOM 4! But I can deal with 11 minute in between turns honestly, just wondered where everyone else was at with their turn times.

[anaris]

I have not yet had a turntime over about 20 seconds, and I play maps of 250-400 provinces, which are considered excessively large by the standard of Dominions. the Faerun adventure map which is famously huge is only about 500 provinces.

[Flashman]

Has anyone benchmarked how to get time between turns down? Does multicore CPU help or is it all single core performance dependent? I would recommend OP solves this issue with updates to hardware. Between Dom5 and Dom6 release, CPU single core performance has gone up. For example, Intel 8700k release in October 2017 vs current gen Intel 14700k shows gains of 80% in single core calculation. Even if the Dominions code is not multithreaded to take advantage of many CPU cores, you could likely get the time down. Someone with both older and newer CPU should maybe test

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8700K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-14700K/3937vs4152

[Rhydoc]

I tend to read a book while I play dominions.

[Scrapulous]

I have played several games on both the Oeridia (1225 provinces) and Faerun (466 + whatever the cavern layer generates). Here are some observations:

Oeridia doesn't have nearly the same problem in Dom 5. I think people saying "you're playing on the wrong maps" are perhaps missing the point: the scope of "right" maps appears to have shrunk since dominions 5.

Oeridia has two problems that I've noticed. The first is that turn times get quite long - upwards of 15 minutes on my non-potato PC during year 4 with AIs set to Impossible. I've gone around the block to get a sandwich and come back to find the turn processing still. This is true but to a much lesser extent in dom 5; the turn times are more like 2 or 3 minutes on my machine for a game on the same map with the same parameters (i.e. every early age nation, AIs set to impossible, random behavior).

The second is that the map itself starts to bog down the UI after around year 5, sooner if you're playing a nation with a lot of passive freespawn. I only see this on dominions 6; it was a problem early in dominions 5's life but performance got better and much more playable during the lifespan of the game. Just clicking into a province can take a couple of seconds from the click to the UI actually selecting the province. Selecting a commander using the mouse is relatively responsive, but using the "n" hotkey takes a second or two as well. Interestingly, going into a different part of the UI, like the magic item trading screen or the army recruitment screen, speeds right back up again. I conjecture that displaying all the individual sprites for all the individual armies all over the map is taxing the game engine, mainly because scrolling parts of the map with few sprites is much faster than scrolling parts of the map with many sprites.

Weirdly, the research screen is profoundly slow under these conditions, too.

I have not had any of these problems on the Faerun map, which is 1/3 to 1/2 the size, depending on the size of the cavern layer (Oeridia never generates a cavern layer, presumably because of province count limits). It's interesting to me that the performance degradation doesn't seem to be linear; i.e. a map with half the provinces doesn't have anything like 50% of the performance degradation. I'm not a benchmarker, but that might be salient information to somebody.

[Talbrys]

Yes, I noticed from turn 1 this was the case. Dom5 first several turns were over in 5-10 seconds, Dom6 first turn was almost a full minute. I get that there is "more" going on in the background as someone said, but I imagine there's some optimization that will be made in future patches that will bring the turn times down.

[Nukular Power]

Originally posted by Talbrys:

Yes, I noticed from turn 1 this was the case. Dom5 first several turns were over in 5-10 seconds, Dom6 first turn was almost a full minute. I get that there is "more" going on in the background as someone said, but I imagine there's some optimization that will be made in future patches that will bring the turn times down.

I mean, there isnt THAT much more going on in the base game..