Why is ground combat taking 3-4 minutes to process?

[snap_leaper]

I am past turn 1000 in a large map. Whenever I click the turn button, it would takes almost 4 minutes to process, mostly on ground combat. I disbanded all my ground troops on every planet and it still takes over 2 minutes. What is going on. On a side note, is there a way to prevent the unrest problem "eaten by harvesters?"

[DeckPrism]

There is apparently some delay due to every ground unit you have (even in the reserves) and also consider that all the AI's have similar numbers of ground units. You can try to use the lock button to rarely allow ground units to be built, and of course run MOO3 on a hot machine, but I have not heard of anything else that will help. Well, play small galaxies with few opponents.

Harvesters and Ithkul are synonymous. They are a parasitic race in the game that "eats" other races. Naturaly, your people don't like being eaten. Therefore, avoid harvesters and glass (completely bombard) their worlds when you find them. Once a planet of yours is infected, you can give it to an enemy and them glass it. Or, some people don't mind having harvesters in their empire since they are such good workers.

[snap_leaper]

Is there a way to scrap all my ground combat troops even from reserves? The only enemy left only has 1 system left so can't have much troops. (Yes, I know I could end the game in three turns, but I am really close to the steller converter, which I want to see work.) For some reason, even at max research on energy and 7 million research points, all my energy technologies take forever to research. It gets down to 4-5 turns and then jumps back to 8-9 turns.

[Patton1942]

There is no way to scrap old groundtroops that I'm aware of.

[SamuraiZombie]

If I remember correctly a lot of other processing not related to ground combat occurs during the period when "Ground Combat" is displayed on the screen. They changed some of it in 1.2.5, I believe, to be put under the "Aging Galaxy" screen, but maybe not all of it.

[Shadow20]

the good old stellar converter...

but now you can't explode planets anymore...too bad

[snap_leaper]

I just realized something else that may be slowing it down. I did not know how to totally scrap ships from my reserves so I sent out Antaran Expitions with them all. There were over 160 missions for the game to process. I am slowing running turns and I lose 1-2 missions every turn. I'll let you know if the speed improves when they are all gone. I am down to 130 missions right now.

[DeckPrism]

160 armada sized expeditions? You do realize that armada sized expeditions have the best (if not only) chance to find an X? That is because expeditions loose ships. When the last ship is gone, everything that expedition found is lost. Therefore, armadas with the most ships stand the best chance of surviving long enough to come home with that X.

Slowdown also discussed here:
http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=356375

[snap_leaper]

About 120 or so were armada size missions. I had a lot of ships to get rid of. I wish I had known that I could scrap ships entirely before that. I have been letting them waste down and am down to 88 missions now. Since it takes so long between turns, I watch T.V. while they process. From now on, the most missions I will ever send on Antaran assignments is 5 armadas at any time.

[snap_leaper]

I finally got rid of the last of the antaran expeditions. The turns still take 4 minutes to process, so I am asuming that my computer just can't handle the large map late in the game. I guess I will just play on small maps now. BTW, my computer is 1.6 ghz and 40 meg hard drive with 256 ram. I only use about 10 megs of my hard drive, that isn't the problem. I gaev up on waiting for my steller converter. It had been stuck way too long and with 4 minutes between turns, I was not going to wait anymore.

[tiger00]

snap -

i used to post on these forums, back when i thought this game might become fun... but alas.

A number of us tried to come to some resolution on this matter. You might try looking up posts by myself or neatstuff. I have no idea if they're still up.

My conclusions, through testing of saved games on my p2 450 and my p4 2.4 are that it is related to the number of planets you own/enemies own.

I believe that the game grows slower as the number of colonized planets go up, the most likely culprits being trade and migration as each planet has to be compared with all your others.

The best solution to speed up your game is to add more RAM if you have less than 512mb I believe, but this is just IMHO. and should be taken as nothing more... also it will only help some, but don't expect times to be cut in half.

THINGS IT IS NOT RELATED TO:
# of ship reserves
# of troop reserves
operating system
development plans
econ ai
actual ground/space combat

ANYONE who says otherwise hasn't tested it. Of those items, the most time is in dev plans and econ ai, but we're talking about 2-4% increase in speed by turning them off.

The most direct relation to time is # of planets owned. Don't believe me? Jack your taxes through the roof, sending system after system into unrest and finally splinter colonies. Watch your time per turn drop...