Slow turns in long games?

[Insurgent]

I've been playing a really really long game and as it's progressed the time between turns has increased to an almost unplayable rate now. It's taking about 90 seconds just to get to the next turn.

I am running a huge galaxy and there's about 6 AI races, but my computer is pretty decent (AMD FX8350, 16gb RAM, SSD) so I would have thought it would be able to handle it fine. I had noticed some posts floating around about bugs/slow turns but the devs seem to think they're resolved - but I guess not.

Has anyone else experienced this and/or are there any solutions?

It just seems that the processing for each race is taking longer and longer (which is possibly understandable as their fleets and civilisation grows bigger). If the devs happen to read this, then I really think it could do with some optimisation - maybe spawn a thread for each race, do the moves at the same time, have a clean-up thread which then resolves combats.... I could be talking total nonsense but it just seems like it needs more parallelisation to do the work more quickly.

Anyway, anyone else still getting this or have a fix?

[Ackranome]

There isn't a fix - playing on a "large" galaxy is insane at this stage.

[Insurgent]

Thanks Ackranome :) I thought it was probably "game internals" that the devs needed to optimise.... lets hope that happens in the not too distant future.

[JimHorton]

I've never seen it take more than 10 seconds. Intel Core i7 6700k, 16gb, SSD. Usually even less. Not trying to be bragadocious here though.

So obviously newer and higher spec than a FX8350 (c. 2012) -edit: fixed typo that said 5830 before- but it doesn't seem like it should be that much of a difference! On the other hand a lot changes CPU wise in four years, and they might be testing the game with 2015+ level tech.
I don't remember having this issue with MOO1 on a dated 386 though. Maybe that game optimized things better, or 'abstracts' some AI moves that are invisible to the player anyway.

[Avalanche]

The longest i have seen it take to process a turn is when i am playing a long game with over 400 stars (mod gave that amount and it takes......15-30 seconds....depending on how much i have and how much i can see.

[madocs]

Do you save every turn? ie.. Have you got every turn enabled on your timeline... I would pull it back to perhaps every 10 turns to try and reduce the turn time.

[Insurgent]

Originally posted by madocs:

Do you save every turn? ie.. Have you got every turn enabled on your timeline... I would pull it back to perhaps every 10 turns to try and reduce the turn time.

Yeah, I'll give that a try. Can that be done mid-game?

Originally posted by JimHorton:

I've never seen it take more than 10 seconds. Intel Core i7 6700k, 16gb, SSD. Usually even less. Not trying to be bragadocious here though.

So obviously newer and higher spec than a FX5830 (c. 2012) but it doesn't seem like it should be that much of a difference! On the other hand a lot changes CPU wise in four years, and they might be testing the game with 2015+ level tech.
I don't remember having this issue with MOO1 on a dated 386 though. Maybe that game optimized things better, or 'abstracts' some AI moves that are invisible to the player anyway.

I was about to say the FX8370 isn't that bad, but then I checked some benchmarks;
http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-6700K-vs-AMD-FX-8370/3502vs2983

Seems the I7 is around 50% faster, which would probably bring my turns in-line with what you're seeing. That said, it shouldn't be *this* sluggy.

[madocs]

no!
I have an I7, 6700K, 4GHx, 32GB RAM, SSD, NVIDIA GTX980 Ti

It still takes forever! Something is seriously not right... I am playing turn 600something, against 3 opponents in a medium cluster galaxy. I have had to give up.... turns take too long!

I wonder if it has to do with something the AI is doing based on a technology.... perhaps the interplanetary administration! The reason I say this is that to move a population around when that is in place, takes some time... if the computer is doing it, that could be the reason!

[JimHorton]

Originally posted by madocs:

no!
I have an I7, 6700K, 4GHx, 32GB RAM, SSD, NVIDIA GTX980 Ti

It still takes forever! Something is seriously not right... I am playing turn 600something, against 3 opponents in a medium cluster galaxy. I have had to give up.... turns take too long!

Maybe AI is like...it's turn 600 and we're still here. We don't know what to doooooo!

[martin77]

one thing i cant understand:
If your game take forever,
why dont share this turnsaves with the devs so they can fix it?
They wrote it in several answers they need reproducable events to fix some things?

@madocs could be right there is something with game events.
For exanple some patches before the game hangs when you attacked a planet where a spy of you were on, or something similar!
. (before the new spy system)

[agnosis]

Every strategy game of every kind is cpu centri, even rts.

fps on the otherhand has been grafix card fixated since its birth.

several strategy game developers, including of course rts have built or adapted
their code to make use of hyperthreading / multiple cores / advanced instruction
set calculations (newest SSE ETC, computing arrays of data, not elements of data)

supreme commander was easy to multithread, and they defaulted their release
to use either dual or quad.. I forget. one of their engineers later released a patch
which could utilize 64 cores... cause why not? change the code for 8 or 64? about as hard
to do either way... with 64 cores max hed never have to repatch.
(every release after supcom1 by that company was multicore from ground up)

starcraft 2 amazingly was never considered a candidate for multicore use... I cant
guess why. they have never attempted to include other cores and have instead
invested a lot of time and technical prowess in simply optimizing the hell out of
the single core engine!!! they must have had a reason... sc2 will always be CPU bound.

I forgot to add action rpgs are pretty cpu intensive, but they tend to be closer to
50/50 and some could go one way or the other.

[martin77]

yes. Sins of a solar empire is another example.
Absolutely great game but sadly reach its limit.

[Insurgent]

Originally posted by martin77:

one thing i cant understand:
If your game take forever,
why dont share this turnsaves with the devs so they can fix it?
They wrote it in several answers they need reproducable events to fix some things?

@madocs could be right there is something with game events.
For exanple some patches before the game hangs when you attacked a planet where a spy of you were on, or something similar!
. (before the new spy system)

I will do so - but they have already had a lot of save games from other people and thought they fixed it, but it seems they haven't yet found the actual cause.

They thought it was a bug with Sakkra AI, but nope. I think as the person above said it's something to do with the AI and tech - possibly Interplanetry Administration or SOMETHING that is causing it to grind to a halt. Either that, or there are just so many moves/ships/colonies per race, per turn that the whole AI needs re-writing or multi-threading.

This does need to be addressed.

Edit: To be clear I don't mean cores/hyperthreads on the CPU but processes/threads in the software so that each race has it's own thread and all moves can be made at the same time, as opposed to 1 thread running them one after the other.

[Davor]

Originally posted by martin77:

one thing i cant understand:
If your game take forever,
why dont share this turnsaves with the devs so they can fix it?
They wrote it in several answers they need reproducable events to fix some things?

I have done this. Even made a new thread of this a week ago. Sadly got no reply from the Devs at all.

[madocs]

some comment from them saying "We are working on this" would be great!

[Shmily_Dana]

I am probably going to give up on my attempt at "007" for this reason.