What's the point in having time dilation?

Then it has nothing to do with the number of planets.

Yes it does, because the more planets there are, the more units!

STOP.....SPAMMING.....UNITS.

Why are you building a trillion units and are patrolling them when hundreds of holkins will do the job with no lag.

Build some SSX and kill your opponent.

I do agree with you on this one. But then again, this whole game's premise was to spam units. I am torn.

Exactly! That's why there is no unit cap.

And yet sometimes, there is no point in doing so. If....the unit cannnon.....was....in...the....game. Then yes sure we could spam units and then actually use them and thus lose them. This would manage the lag.

Honestly I've made this same post countless times, UNIT CANNON FIX EVERYTHING>

There's no cap on nuking your own base or pouring coffee into your gpu. But neither is a good idea.

Sorry to be so blunt but that is such a ridiculous thing to say. Time dilation is an excellent feature, a nice piece of redundancy. Obviously the ideal is to have a server that never gets maxed out, but you can't predict the future! So time dilation elegantly handles the potential situation.

Are you seriously saying that you would rather the game CRASH entirely? As a programmer (and player and user of software), coming up with solutions to avoid your program crashing is vital. It is the #1 thing you must avoid for a good user experience.

The game DOES work! What exactly is causing you frustration? You must be playing some huge games if you are experiencing time dilation all the time... Perhaps aim for smaller games? I'm sure over time the server code will be optimised more, possibly the hardware will be improved and/or upgraded/expanded as well. Plus in the near future we can host our own servers on our own hardware.

Sorry to rant, but the notion of preferring the game to crash is a bit daft!

Been saying this for awhile now...

Well in my experience the sim performance is improving greatly with recent updates. There are a few things that *really* hurt game performance though:

1: Area patrols with masses of *ground* units (as air and orbital don't worry about collisions, area patrol isn't an issue).

2: Trees. Trees add a massive amount of additional objects, start fires & increase the load with regard pathing.

An example of a large (ish) system that is pretty playable- go onto the clan wars server on system sharing and load up Team burnings home system. It consists of 5 planets and plays really well. There are no trees which is a plus.

You can still kill the sim speed though lazy tactics like *planet wide area patrol with a few hundred dox all at once* however just moving the units and large number aren't really to much of an issue.

Nice post @cdrkf - being aware of the game's limitations and processing bottlenecks is a good thing!

Time dilation is just where the game slows down time when there's too much going on, right?

What have I been experiencing in the last 24 hours then? The clock on the bottom-right will be ticking, then stop for like 10 seconds, nothing moving...then it instantly jumps ahead ten seconds. Is this server lag?

I tried turning my graphics settings down from uber to the lowest setting, I don't see a difference. This morning I even got a 4 second lag before my commander even landed on the planet (new match).

And yes, I scanned my system and made sure I wasn't unknowingly mining bitcoins or something... xD

TD sincs the client's game-speed to the server-fps.

Here we go again...

Time dilation is only there to fix the visual aspect of an already slowing down server. If the server cannot handle the game, which almost always happens with huge games. Then instead of the visuals being choppy, the game syncs with the serverslowdown so that everything you see stays smooth.

Previously when the server slowed down you noticed the choppyness, now you don't notice it that much. That's all that has changed.