[Cainehill]

NTJedi said:

Well it sounds like there's something wrong with your system. The first few turns on a very similar system my brother owns typically takes about a dozen seconds to process the early game stage turns and this is with 500+ provinces and 10+ AI opponents.

Which again leads me to suspect that Illwinter needs to look at filtering how often they update the graphics during turn processing. The graphics queue can wind up taking more time (and CPU time) than the actual processing - I looked at something by a professional colleague of mine (he'd been doing graphics programming for 15+ years, X-Windows for 5+), and in less than half a day (counting debugging & profiling) had the program doing in 30 seconds what used to take 15-25 minutes. All because of the way he implemented a visual progress bar.

On my machine (64-bit Athlon, 3500+ Mhz, 2 gigs ram), turn 2 for a 6 player game with 45 provinces takes two seconds. A turn for year 5 of another game takes 32 seconds. I'm guessing that my Radeon 800GT video card is slowing things down a bit, but not nearly as much as a slower card (possibly with worse OpenGL drivers) would do.

IMO, 2 seconds to process turn 2 with 5 normal AIs and 45 provinces is excessive. Not that I can't live with 2 seconds - it's the way the turns keep taking longer and longer, and _either_ it's the graphical status chewing up the time, or (my favorite gripe/peeve) calculating the age on each troop (including independent troops) and its fleas is.

Similarly, getting to view battles takes way too long now - 7 seconds for the black screen to go away, province fades in, fades to battlefield, etc. Since there doesn't seem to be any way to skip the graphical fade in, that's 7 seconds wasted _every_ battle, or worse - multiple viewings of the same battle waste 7 seconds every viewing.

And since you can't pause the battle until _after_ that fade-in is complete, even trying to watch a scout scripted to retreat to spy out indy strength can take 2 or 3 viewings. *mutter*