GAME SPEED

[savvas79]

On fastest setting it takes about 15 seconds for a day to pass..Is It too slow or Is It as fast as It can get???

[McNab]

Its all dependant on CPU speed mate.

Basically, the more capable your PC is, the faster time ticks by...

Sadly its not something as simple as a game setting or problem.

The thing is, this game has a lot of calculations to perform, and I mean more than you can even image Thats the price of realism I guess. Nonetheless, the only way to improve the game speed from the developers point of view is to reduce the calculations, but thats not an area I know anything about.

You could always read a book, or watch a film,

[Legend]

We have been discussing this in other threads... but I will ask you this, why is it too slow? Are you not at war and want things to move faster? If you had even more interaction with other nations would it allow more things to do when not at war? Is speeding up the game something that you want because you feel something else is missing? At fastest game speeds battles are crazy right now. So is this merely an issue of while not at war?

[jscott991]

Is this not mostly an issue of when not at war?

The economy takes a long time to develop. Building a war machine from scratch takes a long time (say if you play as a smaller nation).

Isn't it easy to understand why players would want to be able to make a day go faster than 20-30s when it can take a year or two to build up a decent military if you aren't starting as someone like the US, Russia, or China?

More interaction with other nations would only make the game slightly more frustrating as you try to push through time to build your economy. The game is simply too slow at the moment to be anything other than a wargame. The economic and political models, which are so very detailed, are almost superfluous when it takes hours to get through even a single year.

[el_slapper]

+1

if you play some remote crappy country, you need a few years before being in condition of doing war. when 1 day = 15s, 1 year = 92 minutes. That you spend looking the game play while doing nothing. ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.............................

[Legend]

Well, I guess this is what our world leaders feel. If they are left waiting for wars, they must sleep through their jobs the rest of the time.
We have a model where we use real distance, and movement so tanks drive so far in given period of time. With that in mind... we also model things that take years to do, like tech breakthroughs, or wars, or the improvement of a country.

To the comment about more to do when not at war would only add to frustration... this would be the case only if what you had to do didn't help your end goals of going to war and conquest and expansion.

Here are a few examples:
- more ways to preposition your army
- increase diplomatic effects on trade (so more trade will change the landscape of the map)
- add new items to diplomatic trade and more ways to manage and review existing trade
- random but meaningful events including regional events that the leader can respond to
- introduce ways to communicate beyond trade with AI regions
- other ideas...

[jscott991]

I really think adding more things for the player to do while they are waiting for the economy to develop, research breakthroughs to occur, and military construction to take off is missing the entire point that has people frustrated.

The game simply has to move faster when the player isn't at war in order to make the economic side of the game have some worth. Not everyone (and probably even many) strategy game players are going to give much time to a game where 1 day takes 20-30s, but a carrier takes an entire year to construct or research takes month or a facility takes three months to build, etc.

If you add more options as you talking, you will just increase player frustration. The key to successful conquest or wars as a smaller nation is building up your economy and tech base, combined with facility and military construction. Those things simply take forever with the game speed being what it is.

People coming from games like EU (or any game really; nothing is as slow as 2020) aren't going to always have the patience to deal with the slow speed and adding more things to do during the deadtime isn't going to even hide the game speed problem (and it certainly isn't going to solve it; you're talking about simply trying to distract people from the real issue). In fact, won't more options SLOW the game down further?

[Uglyr]

I agree. It's not interesting at all:
1. Give orders to build a factory
2. Go drink coffee.
3. Return
4. Factory built. OK. Now I can build 2 factories at a time.
5. Give orders to build 2 factories
6. Go drink coffee.
7....

I just can't understand developers. Why is it so hard to add one more speed setting that will run the game at the highest speed the CPU can handle? Will it do harm to anyone?

[Legend]

I just can't understand developers. Why is it so hard to add one more speed setting that will run the game at the highest speed the CPU can handle? Will it do harm to anyone?

The fastest game speed setting is just that already. The fastest a computer can run the game. Faster computers will play the game faster. There are other posts to search for with comments about this. If I find the link I'll post back.

[Rufus101]

I have to agree with jscott and uglyr......

Instead of implementing random events, new ways to preposition your army, adding trade in yak oil and including save the princess missions, why not simply invest this time in trying to make fastest a little faster?

In an age of multicore cpus, games like crysis with ridiculous graphics and physics engines, surely this game can be squeezed to go a bit faster?

[Balthagor]

Not much, George has said that simple optimization will get at most another 20-40% speed, past that we're at the hardware limit. As I've said before, beyond that, the only other choice is to make the game less complex.

And I have to say, I like the current game speed for the most part. Granted I usually have a war going on somewhere on one of my fronts, but during war times I run at normal or slow. When at Peace there are times I'm waiting a bit, but I'm usually poking around at things a lot. Not that I'd mind if it could go faster, any performance increases will just affect "fastest" so my normal/slow setting will still be playable.

Also mentioned before, if we could make it go faster, why wouldn't we? It's not like we're holding something back...

[Uglyr]

Also mentioned before, if we could make it go faster, why wouldn't we? It's not like we're holding something back...

Sorry... maybe I'm a bit bad in English...

[midn8t]

Its all dependant on CPU speed mate.

Basically, the more capable your PC is, the faster time ticks by...

Sadly its not something as simple as a game setting or problem.

The thing is, this game has a lot of calculations to perform, and I mean more than you can even image Thats the price of realism I guess. Nonetheless, the only way to improve the game speed from the developers point of view is to reduce the calculations, but thats not an area I know anything about.

You could always read a book, or watch a film,

this can not be completly true maybe little but not all, becuase I got game running a quad amd am2+ core black edition with 8 gigs of ram and on a dual core 4000 amd with 8 gigs of ram both have same video card and hard drive yet on fastest speed they both change days in same number of secounds.

[jscott991]

I don't buy the game is running at its max right now either. I honestly can run EU3 at the same time in the background of 2020 and there is no performance drop in 2020 (there is a huge performance drop for EU3, however). It still takes between 20s-30s to complete a day. I'm running a quadcore with 4GB of RAM, etc. and 2020 should not be capping out at 20s per game day. And if is, then there's something wrong with the basic design. Its simply unacceptable for a year of game time to take 3 hours and yet it takes a year to build a carrier, 3 months to build a facility, and even longer to conduct some research.

The game has to go faster. Otherwise its going to gather dust on most people's shelves very quickly or its not going to be purchased at all.

[Legend]

I'll bring this discussion back to when it should go faster. I've read some responses that it should go faster if not at war. But while at war it should go slower. Should this happen when anyone is at war? What if you are not at war but your ally is declared upon? Should we slow it down so you can get a task force together and help your ally? What if any region is at war... what if their borders changed so drastically that you didn't get in on a battle at the right time? I realize that many people would like the game to go faster... but lets' move beyond if it can or can't for a moment and discuss when it should or shouldn't... why? Because these are some of the things we have to discuss when developing the game. And, I'll mention that if all we did was speed up the game... and not consider anything else then we may have troubles like this... email currently expires at 30 days. If you zip time along... you may not have time to read email before it's deleted. We could modify this but these are the things we have to do. As diplomatic offers come in you may not have time to respond to them either. Currently, most offers expire in seven days. Would longer expiration dates be suitable or could that cause difficulties? We think that an offer could be made and if given too much time to "consider it" situations could arise and then the offer could be problematic. We have also stated that one possible way to speed up the game could be to put certain things on hold... what actions could you live without? Do you see that the conversation needs to go beyond "just make it faster!" ?

edit... I'm moving this thread to the "Development" forum.