Why does calculating offline progress take so long now?

[sircrimsonfox]

It really is a long time as opposed to before when it was practically immediate. Has the game changed? Are there added things?

[kab_reg]

They experiment with several algorithms for it. Apparently, some of them are better than others.

[sircrimsonfox]

was just curious more than anything.

[Hecate]

It took long for me over the 5.5 last years. It improved recently (since patch v494.1?), but I've barely played the last 2 days, a bit tired by server crashs, so I can't say if it's back to worst.

Those long calculations are my major grief about the game. A glitch or an unbalance, I can understand, and get on with it, but that long calculations, it's just lazy and/or unsmart optimization, especially compared to other idle games I'd played. A few seconds is nice, 20 or 30, why not... But minutes as it takes sometimes, it's just a shame such a bad speed of calculation.

Hell, my phone is far quicker to calculate 2^(2^(2^(2^2))) and it's a way bigger number than anything we'll see soon in the game (>2e19728), so it's clearly bad optimization from devs.

[Daggot]

I've been thinking about this for a while. And, I've come to the conclusion that it's not the same kind of calculation that other idle games do. A lot of idle games use linear calculations. Cookie Clicker might be a good example. There isn't much you can do in that game to affect the progress of the game. The game is very linear and the results are very linear. Other than the golden cookie, there is little variation between games.

But Idle Champions uses time based calculations and some of the variable move or adjust based on time. Soft cap is an example. Having champion's abilities change while offline is another. You end up having to run a simulation of what's happening during that time period. You wouldn't want to run the entire game calculation like in real time, so they take various approximations and extrapolate. They still have to do numerous checks of DPS calculations against formation/positional abilities to determine of the formation passes a level. They could reduce this down greatly and just be more generous with offline payout. But, they choose not to. If they did, it would reduce the calculation time for offline.

This is all speculation. I'm not a game developer, but it's easy to see there is more complexity in this game than other idle games. Each play through for each player is completely different, and not just because of random outcome during a campaign. It's far more complicated than that. So, I'm just making some guesses based on crude evidence and thinking about how something like time value calculations could be used. Favor to click wall is a curve and the intersection to monster health is where your click wall ends up. That sort of thing.

[CommanderGreven]

For me, who use speed potions in background parties, this is a real problem when launching the game after many hours with game closed (lets say 12hours at night with computer turned off), after all this time, game easily needs +2hours of "calculatings" in a row for background parties catch the actual moment, the present. After that point, all is glory compared...

"Each run its different", "They calculate your gems each run", "I can pee further", etc etc... After +10k hours I dont care if each run give its own number of gems, instead I would greatly appreciate the game "simulate" 1st run (like now does) after game was turned off, and, like nothing changed with game closed, then Copy-Pasta following runs with an adjudicate average of gems, in theory this would be an improve specially in performance but i dont have any programming knowdlege, so idk exactly.

[Hecate]

@Daggot: This is probably right to a point, they account for too much things and variables but it's a blame on them nonetheless, that's just underline their bad optimization. To a point because I'm not sure they calculate so much things precisely, you can see how much hard variants boss can be bypassed offline or background when they can't be foreground. That clearly shows how they don't calculate and simulate "everything".

Anyway, our computers have teraflop calculation powers, they can make trillion of (simple) calculations per second. And in fact, my spreadsheet simulates all champions and variables, including legendaries, blessings, modron (for each potential DPS), and it gives me results in a second.

Let's take an exemple. As game balance is based on order of magnitude, you can use quite approximative numbers, 3 or 4 digits is enough, we don't anyway see numbers after the 2nd one. You must have more than 100% discrepency to have bad offline simulation (= wrong area), that's quite a margin. I'm not sure they use such simplified numbers still (I don't know how much digits they are taking into account, but probably too much). And in fact their calculation are broken anyway. The HoBG bug is now quite frequent when offline progress bypass by much our effective wall. A time, those calculations take me to area 2900, that's total non-sense. And I've seen other formations surpassing their theorical wall (like ending an area with mob e30+ hp above BUD).

So they're not working well neither in speed nor in accuracy. I just hope they continue to improve it.

NB: But that kind of *** also happens online and foreground. A time, I had a BUD spike of e800 with Hew Maan when moving things around my formation. That was clearly unintented and wrong calculation somewhere (as they existed/exists with ultimates, overkills, spread damages, double dipping, etc).

[kab_reg]

Because their toted calculations are mostly just the good old cryptomining?

[Hecate]

Probably, given how they love money so much and how every paid content is overpriced far beyond common sense (but I'm glad to know I'd open for over $50k value of golden chests alone without ever paying for one of them... ^^).

[CommanderGreven]

Originally posted by CommanderGreven:

For me, who use speed potions in background parties, this is a real problem when launching the game after many hours with game closed (lets say 12hours at night with computer turned off), after all this time, game easily needs +2hours of "calculatings" in a row for background parties catch the actual moment, the present. After that point, all is glory compared...

"Each run its different", "They calculate your gems each run", "I can pee further", etc etc... After +10k hours I dont care if each run give its own number of gems, instead I would greatly appreciate the game "simulate" 1st run (like now does) after game was turned off, and, like nothing changed with game closed, then Copy-Pasta following runs with an adjudicate average of gems, in theory this would be an improve specially in performance but i dont have any programming knowdlege, so idk exactly.

Apparently my suggestion for my issue was taken in the wrong sense in "An Hour of Potions" update... they decided cut all our offline progress to up 1 reset (for background parties), no matter the amount of offline time, well... another solution against playerbase from this devs (gg wp).

Anyone know by their streams or somewhere else if this is a temporary patch or a deffinitive change?

[LostSoul]

I can confirm that background parties actually calculate champion attack speeds and enemy movements. I discovered this with certain champions (turiel and voronika) whose attack speed are too slow to reliably kill enemies before they reach the formation. And since the party couldn't form at all until something gets killed, the party couldn't form correctly, because the champion's column and any columns ahead of them would be blocked by attacking enemies, just as they would be if this was the active party.

This, as it turned out, was the cause of my background parties repeatedly forming incorrectly. Once I swapped out those slow-attacking champions for fast-attacking ones, the 'problem' resolved itself.

[CommanderGreven]

Originally posted by LostSoul:

I can confirm that background parties actually calculate champion attack speeds and enemy movements. I discovered this with certain champions (turiel and voronika) whose attack speed are too slow to reliably kill enemies before they reach the formation. And since the party couldn't form at all until something gets killed, the party couldn't form correctly, because the champion's column and any columns ahead of them would be blocked by attacking enemies, just as they would be if this was the active party.

This, as it turned out, was the cause of my background parties repeatedly forming incorrectly. Once I swapped out those slow-attacking champions for fast-attacking ones, the 'problem' resolved itself.

Do you use 1 familiar in click damage and 1 leveling click?

[sircrimsonfox]

Again I am not saying it's a HUGE deal. Or maybe it is? I dunno. I hope it isn't harder on the system. At least this way I can see its progress...

[LostSoul]

Originally posted by CommanderGreven:

Originally posted by LostSoul:

I can confirm that background parties actually calculate champion attack speeds and enemy movements. I discovered this with certain champions (turiel and voronika) whose attack speed are too slow to reliably kill enemies before they reach the formation. And since the party couldn't form at all until something gets killed, the party couldn't form correctly, because the champion's column and any columns ahead of them would be blocked by attacking enemies, just as they would be if this was the active party.

This, as it turned out, was the cause of my background parties repeatedly forming incorrectly. Once I swapped out those slow-attacking champions for fast-attacking ones, the 'problem' resolved itself.

Do you use 1 familiar in click damage and 1 leveling click?

I haven't tested that before, but the number of familiars available for me to field, while still maintaining my active party, is limited (especially during seasons), and it was easier to use benchslot 1 champions with quicker attack speeds, like Bruenor or Orkira. Turiel and Voronika have inexplicably awful attack speeds, literally for no reason. Other champions with slow attack speeds (but still faster than Turiel or Voronika) have secondary effects like stuns or knockbacks. But Turiel and Voronika's attacks do nothing.

It's another example of CNE not playing their own game. If they did, they'd know that background parties can't form until something gets killed, and all parties can start out with a slot 1 champion on the field, so all slot 1 champions should be have reasonably fast attack speeds (4-6s) to accommodate that.

[kab_reg]

Taking into account how buggy background mode is in general, it's probably the least of their concerns.

[Hecate]

CNE has only one concern: $
They won't make an improvement, when you can buy two familars to get through their bad design.