I just started playing yesterday. I've gotta say I really like it. I love how the battles are shorter than TA etc and the multiple planets thing is cool. I also found I picked it up with no instructions at all so kudos for the UI design. Oh - it was totally odd when I first loaded it up. The galactic screen is like the World's most simplified mini-game. I was "Uh-ok" at the time. I was showing it to a hot chick on the bus as "one of my fave games" and it was an amusing "It's not this ****, honest" thing. I've been playing single player. Downloaded the game to play on a 12hour flight I have soon. From what I can see there's some requirement we all be connected to an online server - and we can't save? I haven't seen anything in single player so far that gives me any benefit from being 'online'. It sounds like a few of these things are about to be fixed but as the game is at the moment it's hard to find a time when I can actually play it. I can't save so once I start the game I have to have it open till I complete a battle - but - it totally hoses through battery power even when paused. So if I want to catch a fumigates in the rec room at lunch and then pause it after... it'll eat through a full battery if I have even an hour's meeting. Ditto playing on the train. I'm not sure when exactly I'll be able to play the game. The only time I get 1hr+ straight with power and no need to be on battery is in the evening at home on my desk. Uber posted about offline mode on the homepage being on the 9th. Is there any more info about that? Did it happen? How do I do it? I came in the forum to try and figure out what this online connection is even supposed to do, so I shall return to that.
Found the sticky about enabling offline mode. Keen for a thread or two to read on what the server part actually does in single player.
The server runs almost all of the game logic, which includes the entire simulation of the game world. You can only run it on your own computer for offline play if your machine is powerful enough to do it, which normally would mean you need 8GB of memory.
...And a hefty CPU. my bet is you won't be able to play on the plane or on the train. unless you can get enough internet on either.
Don't check, but seems smooth to me! I only play with one or two ais. Takes me a bit to load the planet, but as smooth as butter afterwards. Edit: it's funny, I set the server to wait 10 minutes to force commander drop, just to compensate for loading times! XD
Memory demands of the server can varry widely. From 300 MiB to 1.8 GiB startign size, depending on the system. The memory also linerary grows as the game keeps accumulating ChronoCam Data. A game cannot run infinitely due to ChronoCam memory demands. The other big problem for the server is that the simulation is currently single-threaded. While most other stuff is multithreaded, the simulation alone needs a single powerfull core. Sim Speed is more dependant on CPU speed then number of Cores. If you are at the recommended Specs for the game RAM/CPU wise (the point where the game itself activates the local server) you should be able to play every part of the GW. Just try to finish off the big maps in about an hour or you will propably still notice slowdown/Out of memory exceptions.
