Why 'Strategic Command Classic: Global Conflict' is so extremely slow?

[drleon]

Why 'Strategic Command Classic: Global Conflict' is so extremely slow?



It concerns my favorite scenarios like within "Play assault on democracy" is "1939 world at war" but NOT only. I know it has biggest maps. But I have a very fast and modern computer and anyway computer movements take upp to 15 minutes (sometimes more!).
More precisely in the beginning of the game it takes 3-5 minutes for computer to complete its turn but later, the longer game lasts the more time it takes.
I tried any versions, any options och screen resolutions. It totally does not make any difference if I choose "show moves/combat" or "quick animation" or "message off".
I would be most happy if I can totally switch off / skip computers movement och don't have to see it at all.
I makes that a whole game especially my favorite scenarios take some days to complete. 90% of this time is computers movements which are only a waste of time for me. Maybe someone like to see it but there should be option to skip it totally.

And my question is:
Is it not technically possible to modify the game so that I don't need to see 'computer thinking', 'computer planning', 'computer purchasing' under 10 minutes or more?
In the worse case let it last 15-20 seconds but not so extremely long. I love the game but it takes most of my time and I will change it.

[Hubert Cater]

Hi drleon,

This is an older release but there are ways to speed things up and hopefully the following will help. In the OPTIONS screen I would suggest the following settings for maximum speed:

- Messages (AI TURN) = OFF
- Show Moves/Combat = OFF
- Quick Animation = ON
- Quick Logic = ON

Beyond that there is no real way to speed up the AI calculations as they currently are as the game still needs to process all the moves, paths, combats and so on. It is true that the newer game is much more optimized, but it is a newer code base that was extensively overhauled and is unfortunately not backwards compatible.

But that being said, I just ran a first turn of the Axis AI (Global Conflict Gold) with those settings as described above and it resolved the 1939 World At War campaign in under 1 minute and this is on a computer that is about 10 years old.

Exact same setup for Assault on Democracy, and the first Axis AI turn took 2 minutes.

Hopefully you'll find similar results on your end as well.

Hubert

[drleon]

Hi! Thanks for Your respons. Can I get a newer version of the game that works faster? Can You recommend this och where can I get it? I tried any options and configurations.
I love this type of games and I can pay extra price only to play faster (not to see computer movements).
That's true that in the beginnig of the game it works a bit faster, say 2-3 minuter for computer to move.
But, later and at the end, when much more units on the play it takes about 20 minutes though I have very powerul computer (i7 processor, 1 TB SSD disc, 32 RAM and so on...).
I wonder if a human player have to see 'computer thinking, planning...' at all? I mean such a version there one can skip it completely? Is it possible nowadays, I mean technically?
Take a chess. Even in professional version, at highest level computer thinks max ... 1 minute.

[Hubert Cater]

Unfortunately we don't have an updated faster version of this build but there have been speed improvements with each of our newer releases.

Our latest games are technically much faster but the comparison is a difficult one as the maps are bigger and there are more units in play so that ends up cancelling out some of the time improvements.

Hard to directly compare to chess as the calculations are a bit different. For example a lot less units on a chess board and a lot smaller, and most chess AI computations are a calculation of different move combinations and so on.

Whereas in a wargame pathfinding is the most expensive calculation and the bigger the map and the more coastlines the longer it takes depending on some of the worst case scenarios.

The good thing is a lot of this has been optimized in our latest games and AI turn times have been speed up quite a bit. But at times, when there are a lot units in play, and almost all countries are in play, it can still take some time, there is no way around that at the moment.