How to reduce my mods turn time?

[jonesie85two]

Hello all, I have been building a BOTF mod for quiet some time. I believe i have finally reached a point where i can just say its ok to play. Naturally i play tested it. By turn 90 my turn times are around 30-45 seconds. By turn 125 my turn times are around 3-4 minutes and by turn 140-150 my turn times are 7 mins plus.

Sadly, this is not a fun experience.

I am curious what options are there in the way of reducing turn time? So far im thinking about reducing colonizable star systems. increasing build costs and maintenance of vessels to reduce the ammount of starship movement and settlement management during turn phases (unsure if this will stop the ai though... apparently it cheats!). but are there other options?

Also, BOTF is an old game. My older brother (who plays this game) called it a classic... my friends call it a barbaric excuse of mashed together coding. anyway... back to my point. Its an old game... does BOTF actually use all available system resources or is it limited by its own engine/directx9 i think?

the PC im running the gaem on is a simple Win7 64x system with 4gb ram, Sempron 145 (single core) 2.80ghz with a 512mb graphic card

the game stats:-

Advanced Start.
Many minor races.
Impossible difficulty (same turn "lag" on normal difficulty aswel).
Randoms On.
Irregular Galaxy
Medium Map Size (Edited, detailes below)

Edited Galaxy info (for the chosen gal size):-

- avg sum of space objects: 200
- maximum number of minor races (many): 30
- Map size: 40x30

Match Details

Turn 140.

Romulans (me). 74 colonies, 7 Minors, 301 vessels and 21 starbases. ok, a little over the top on the expansion side of this
Cardassians, 15 colonies, 1 minor, 28 vessels and 2 starbases, (they provoked me).
Federation, 23 colonies, 4 minors, 256 vessels and 5 starbases.
Dominion (replacing Ferengi), 19 colonies, 2 minors, 180 vessels and 7 starbases.
Klingons, 19 colonies, 1 minor, 262 vessels and 1 starbase.

[thunderchero]

normal maps sizes
fewer systems
lower generated credited
less ships

[jonesie85two]

ok. im going to try and keep the large map sizes for as long as possible... its an ego thing.

Fewer systems, is it just colonizable systems or things like wormholes, nebulas and neutrons aswel? atm i have 200ish stellar objects... reducing that to 100ish will be my next gamble with that.

Lower Generated credited (credits?) basically my credits per turn is WAAAAAAAY to high. to reduce ships i was going to increase starship build cost and
Maint but perhaps dealing with th base issue woudl be a better option.

How does the Credit Per Turn sum work.

Basically, my capitol in the above mentioned match is producing 1958 Credits per turn (852 without bonus'!!! Gonna remove THAT building). Hmm, im quite embarrased tbh. a had a building called [Income Bonus] was intended to be buildable in all systems. i set it to 115% -_-. should have been 15%. drop that % or remove all together would reduce my overall income. Would the AI have built this building?

I had added 7 "Bonus" buildings to the game for reaching T10...

[Food Bonus] +5% Food
[Industry Bonus] +5% Industry
[Energy Bonus] +5% Energy
[Science Bonus] +5% Research
[Intel Bonus] +5% Intel
[Income Bonus] +115% Income -_-
[Morale Bonus] +5% Morale... This one embarrases me also, i had set it to martial law boost. Which was automatically removed from UE as an option for non martial law buildings. Although, now when ever i would click on any of them i woudl get a message

setSelectedIndex: 10 out of bounds. and once error message was dismissed all the settings of the [Bonus] buildings were corrupted... eg: the one i know ingame that actually give +5%food is saying it give energy etc.

going to remove them all for the time being.

Also, do you think the AI would have even built them? just curious.


UPDATE: Used UE to edit save file. Loaded in as on of the other factions. They built the food, industry in Quo'nos and Food, Industry, Energy, Science, Intel but no income... checked all the Klingon star systems. no income bonus sructures. If not for my broken buildings they woudl have all kicked my rump lol.

[jonesie85two]

UPDATE: I doubled the maintenance and build cost of all starships and starbases. Removed the bugged income bonus building (-_-). Reduced the number of stellar objects by 25%.

My turn time dropped from 3-4 minutes on a normal difficulty playthrough to 1-2 minutes... not a bad improvement. In hindsight adding more structures to new founded colonies. probably didnt help the turn times heheh.

going to reduce the stellar objects a little more.

Thank you for the help :-)