Game speed 1.4 vs 1.3.11

[tonypa]

Removal of daily ticks is godsend to anyone not wanting to slowly lose their mind while looking at the screen where absolutely nothing happens. Sad, that it took whole year to get rid of it, but really happy it is finally gone.

Running the game from 1. april 1337 to 2. january 1338 in observer mode, 1 speed below max:
1.3.11 - 5 min 28 sec - 328 sec
1.4 beta - 2 min 23 sec - 143 sec

That is over 2x the old speed. It actually starts to feel like playable game.

The game still lags on every new month. But less.

[martinlowrey79]

I was in favour of daily ticks rather than the hourly but playing on the open beta the game does not feel as immersive. The issue is for me is that the game is too quick, i normally play on speed level 4 but now on daily ill have to be on level two. The now battles are not as engaging as they were before.

maybe a compromise ticks ever 12 hours if that's possible?

You'll never please everyone i know.

[tonypa]

But you can lower the speed. Is that not the same as hourly ticks?

[martinlowrey79]

Yes i have maybe i need to spend more time to get used to it but not enjoying the beta at moment due to the daily ticks as lost the emersion for me maybe i am in the minority.

[Alvin]

我支持每小時
想要每日的人 為何不自己調高遊戲速度
我覺得你們是需要ai幫你們玩遊戲

[tonypa]

Here is Johan talkin about the speed improvements:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/a-bonus-dev-diary-on-the-performance-work.1942550/

[eaerion]

Originally posted by tonypa:

Removal of daily ticks is godsend to anyone not wanting to slowly lose their mind while looking at the screen where absolutely nothing happens. Sad, that it took whole year to get rid of it, but really happy it is finally gone.

Running the game from 1. april 1337 to 2. january 1338 in observer mode, 1 speed below max:
1.3.11 - 5 min 28 sec - 328 sec
1.4 beta - 2 min 23 sec - 143 sec

That is over 2x the old speed. It actually starts to feel like playable game.

The game still lags on every new month. But less.

Just ask for a faster top speed. You don't need to remove granularity for that and kill tactical warfare.

[rubish 1]

i dont get what people say the tactical warfare is? isnt it the same regardless? you walk in and you fight the guy and it just goes by faster

[tonypa]

Originally posted by rubish 1:

i dont get what people say the tactical warfare is? isnt it the same regardless? you walk in and you fight the guy and it just goes by faster

Yep. Some people just like to watch the numbers go down at slower pace.

[Krozan]

Nah the first 5h was bombardment phase. Idk how its calculated now.

Anyway the early warfare suck hard now, u get 0 morale just by moving one province away.

[eaerion]

Originally posted by rubish 1:

i dont get what people say the tactical warfare is? isnt it the same regardless? you walk in and you fight the guy and it just goes by faster

It is about sending additional forces every several ticks so your army doesn't get morale damage while being in reserves. Also hunting enemy armies while they have max morale penalty for movement.

[martinlowrey79]

I play with a group normal 7 to 10 and due to the tick change the game was stopped as no one wanted to play on the beta.
The immersion of the battles and running of game with pop ups seemingly every two to three weeks and political influence which seems a new mechanic to slow the growth of player.

This beta and update removes the fun of game to a level we are not actively arranging a new muli game and judging by the steam numbers others have the same feeling.

[GuastardoDellaRadica]

Originally posted by eaerion:

Just ask for a faster top speed. You don't need to remove granularity for that and kill tactical warfare.

There used to be 7 speeds. The pacing was slow even at speed 7.
The sensible choice would be to ask for better optimization, but Paradox is clearly unable or uncapable to better optimize this game.
So yeah, I'll take a game that runs better over historically hyperaccurate battles.

[KroganCharr]

Originally posted by eaerion:

Just ask for a faster top speed. You don't need to remove granularity for that and kill tactical warfare.

If the hourly ticks are going to mean anything, the game needs to update and calculate things during every hourly tick. That slows the game down. It's not about speed settings, it's about performance. The game cannot run faster than it can do all the necessary calculations. And from what people are reporting, it's not a hardware issue either, the game is slow even for people who have high end computers.

[eaerion]

Originally posted by KroganCharr:

Originally posted by eaerion:

Just ask for a faster top speed. You don't need to remove granularity for that and kill tactical warfare.

If the hourly ticks are going to mean anything, the game needs to update and calculate things during every hourly tick. That slows the game down. It's not about speed settings, it's about performance. The game cannot run faster than it can do all the necessary calculations. And from what people are reporting, it's not a hardware issue either, the game is slow even for people who have high end computers.

They are working on it.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/tinto-talks-123-1-4-performance-and-campaign-timeline.1941000/
Apparently the main improvement to performance came with a parallelization and and rewriting some of algorithms having bad O(n) complexity. So maybe let's give them a chance to improve performance without butchering the gameplay first.

Quoting: "while removing hourly ticks is not the only thing that can be done to improve pacing, they are one of the easiest."

"On average we aim for games to tick 40-50% faster than 1.3."

"And as a bonus, removing the hourly tick has added about 10-15% faster performance as well."

They are treating pacing and performance as two different things and I think players are confusing them a bit. So... are your complains about performance (a game takes too much in-life time even when running on max speed) or about pacing (there is too many ticks per campaign in general)?

[KroganCharr]

Originally posted by eaerion:

They are treating pacing and performance as two different things and I think players are confusing them a bit. So... are your complains about performance (a game takes too much in-life time even when running on max speed) or about pacing (there is too much ticks per campaign in general)?

Both

Performance impacts pacing in this particular context, because performance puts a hard limit on how fast the game can progress.

However, even if the performance impact of hourly ticks were reduced to the point that it can no longer be felt, I still don't think it's sensible to have hourly ticks in a game that covers a timespan of 500 years. 500 years at 365 days per year is 182,500 days (I know it's actually a few months less because the game starts in April, but it's close enough). That is 182,500 times per campaign where a player may want to pause the game and react to what is happening. If we were to presume a player spends an average of 1 second per day tick (sometimes less when fast forwarding, sometimes considerably more whenever they pause and do something), that'd sum up to just over 50 hours for a full campaign. That is more than plenty in my books.

I understand that some players want to intervene in ongoing battles, but also don't want battles to take 3 weeks because it's unrealistic, but there are more elegant solutions to this problem. For example, we could take a page out of Total War's playbook and give the player the chance to actively manage ongoing battles while the greater campaign is paused in the background. That would work seamlessly in single player. As for multiplayer, I haven't played it so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd think hour ticks can't really be used meaningfully there anyway unless you slow the game down way too much, so I don't think autoresolving battles would be a big loss in multiplayer.