In all the big games I have played recently, with lots of units, it slows down to much less than real-time. It's no-where near as fun, and can be quite boring when the action, or whatever, slows down to about 1/8 of the real-time speed. Post Lobby Ids to help the devs look into these cases. I also suggest to the devs that they set up an analytics system to alert them to games that slow down (much?) slower than real-time, so they can look look into these occurrences without players pointing them out. It would also be great to get public visibility on the time dilation that occurs - that way I would know when it's been fixed without having to play and risk the annoying experience of my epic battle slowing to a crawl. Please do no post about issues to do with client-side performance here.
You seem to asume the game should run as fast as you want it too. Reality disagrees. It says the game runs as fast as it can, not more nothing less. This game scale can overpower every computer on the planet. In fact we are going to run out of adresseable memory on a x64 systems before we will reach the programatic unit cap. The uber servers performance is acceptable. And you need to go far out of your way to get them to slow down. Once offline mode is around you can throw however much Computing power you have at the games. Till then just stop going out of you way to force the server to slow down.
Some battles really do slow down to about 1/8 real time. If you don't experience it in the games that you play, perhaps you can believe that others do experience it. I was not going out of my way to force it to slow down, let alone going far out of my way to cause it. Seeing it go at 1/8 the normal speed strongly implies that that 'every computer on the planet' would be have in excess of the required computing power (though there are issues to do with how much it can be parallelised). I'm not talking about a theoretical unit cap that has to do with x32 or x64 memory addresses. I'm talking about it slowing down when there are hundreds or thousands of units, especially when they are moving, patrolling, or doing something else interesting. The server performance is acceptable only when it's simulating massive battles in real-time. That's one of the main stated purposes of the game, I want to see it happen, whether on a server that's run by Uber or otherwise. Posting the lobby IDs will help the developers optimize it further - I'm glad that their attitude is not that it's fast enough already (ie no more need to optimize).
More optimization is always good, though the main point of concern imho is how well it will scale with future hardware, which is likely to have not that much more processing power per core, but many many more cores. But yeah posting lobby ids of games that slowed down unusually hard is helpful for sure.
This issue is incredibly frustrating. I usually quit before the game is done if this occurs. I cannot wait for slow battles to occur. Are there any tips or patterns that solve this? Any mods that mitigate it? Eliminating air units? No water? Radius smaller than 600? I love the gameplay, hate the sim speed. Once it drops below 4, it is unbearable.
Fair enough, i also have this concern, because the industry is absolutly not going for higher frequency cores, even if last Intel cpu have higher frequencies and if a change of architecture can also help to increase the power of a single core.
welcome to the club. And this is why i can't wait to get the offline server available. I'm like you i enjoy PA, but get this dramatic frustration when going for massive battles.
