How to check game speed?

[Legatus]

Is there a program/mod/command showing in general how long it takes for a year or a month to pass?

[Oakshield]

There's a timer shown in the top right corner of the game.

Simply pause the game, and start a stopwatch when you unpause it. Stop the stopwatch after you paused it again and you will know.

However.............


- Time stops when you pause the game, so you have to add the time you need to do things in a paused game to your calculations;

- The more you progress into the future, the longer it'll take your cpu to make the calculations as well as creating a save point each month. You will need to add that to your calculations as well.

- Unless you have set them all not to do so, some events will pause the game. As some of those events are random, you will need to add an estimate pause time used for that as well.

- and finally; you have different speed settings; from very slow to very fast. Meaning if you play at very slow you will most likely progress one game-day into the same time a very fast setting may use for example 10 days. That's something you need to take into your calculations as well.


Personally I prefer to play at my own pace, not restricted by how long a year or month in Stellaris would take. Reason for that is that I pause the game when it becomes too hectic, slows it down when I'm in combat so I can see if I need to send in support or not, speeds up when I have not much to do and so on.

But if you manage to play the game at the same speed from start to finish, you may indeed use the gamespeed / stopwatch method to figure it out.

Thorin :)

[Peter34]

It used to be that the game ran at exactly 1 decade passed per hour played (3600 seconds = 1 second/day) if the CPU was able to keep up, on Normal speed.

I timed it quite some years ago. Fast was twice as fast. Very Fast seemed to be either 2.5 or 3 times faster than Fast (you can still find my post about it on the subReddit), but others have told me that Fast is as fast as the CPU allows, and even early game mine wasn't faster than x5 or x6 Normal speed.

A couple of years later, I also timed Slow and Very Slow. Weirdly, Slow is 2/3 the speed of Normal, and Very Slow is 1/3 the speed of Normal. You'd expect the differences were larger, but they weren't.

And then maybe a year after that, the speed of Normal was changed to be faster than 1 day per second. And that initial timing wasn't just random. I timed 60 days once and it took exactly 60 seconds, making it abundantly clear that the game "wanted" to run at that rate on Normal speed. But after the change that's no longer the case.

The devs somehow changed how fast Normal "wants" to run, for no good reason, but they've never talked about it. It's not a drastic change. At least with my old CPU. It's still something like 1.5 days per second or something like that, not too far from the exact 1.0 days it used to be. But it's just the kind of change that there's no good reason to make, and yet the devs made it.