VB6 Aurora:Game Slowdown

NPR battle slowdown

Sooner or later you will notice the game suddenly taking a long time to calculate events when you click the "30 Days" (or any other) time button. That's usually because of aliens fighting battles in other places in the galaxy.

It can be annoying, but it's an unavoidable side effect of Aurora's detailed battle system and the fact that the aliens play according to the same rules as the players.

To find out what's slowing down your game, go into SM Mode, then open the Event Log window. You might find find entries there that are usually hidden from the player, like "Time increment changed to 00:00:05 due to possible fleet interception" or something similar.

It is hard to say how long a battle can take. It depends on the number of ships involved, systems used, sensor ranges and of course calculation speed is dependent on your computer's CPU. A 30-day turn that used to take 30 seconds to calculate suddenly takes 5 minutes or longer. In some cases players have waited an hour for the turn to finish. But don't give up - it's a temporary condition. Go get some coffee.

How to fight faster battles

If your battle turns take too long to calculate, go into SM Mode and then go to the Contacts tab of the system map window. There is a button labeled "Spacetime bubble in this system". That means it "freezes" everything else in the game. Nothing outside this system moves, detects, produces or eats up valuable CPU time.

Don't forget to switch it off when you're done. Also note that when the enemy is probably calling reinforcements from nearby systems, ST Bubbles could be considered cheating.

Civilian ship slowdown

Too many civilian ships can also slow down the game to some degree (although a few dozen shouldn't be a problem).

Universe size slowdown

As the explored universe expands, by yourself, an NPR or something else, your game speed may begin to slow down as Aurora will need to start tracking much larger numbers of systems, planets, orbits etc., especially as more systems will be occupied and more empires will crop up. Changing the maximum number of systems to a lower number can help to alleviate this, but it is generally an unavoidable side-effect of longer games.