Can i make the game play faster than x4?

if not, can we get that option in an update at some point?

The game engine runs at the speed you see, i.e.,
when you run at 4X fast targets become harder to hit,
and point defense does not work as well, etc.

Further acceleration would make the problem worse.

(OTOH, X0.1 makes fighters a bit easier to hit. :wink:

yes yes of course an it slow the time around you too…

how much more speed do you want or maybe the button “calculate results” should be designed?

to be honest i wuoldnt mind an auto calculate results button. I’m sitting here watching a match in campaign mode with 2 of my cruisers vs 2 enemy cruisers and it’s playing at 4x and even at this rate its still going to take about a day or so to complete the battle.

The thing is, when you have no control over the game and just simply have to sit there and watch the battles happen, it can be like pulling teeth just sitting there watching doing nothing. And after a while yes I would like to just click an auto calc button to get the show going.

Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of the game?

This doesn’t seem right. Many simulation games let you speed up and slow down time and it doesn’t affect the results at all. This is because anything happening on the screen at a normal speed for us is happening excruciatingly slow for the game. So your fighter just took 3 seconds to cross the screen… the computer has fallen in love, had a family, got divorced, won the lottery, and taken up collecting antique ceramic plates in that amount of time.

Think of it this way - no sensible implementation would give the user a game engine option (i.e. an option unrelated to the ships being deployed) which so drastically affects the outcome of a simulation.

You’re entirely right. This is also why Sorcerer is wrong. I bet at 4x there may be some odd behaviour on very big battles just like with a lot of games with adjustable time factor, but overall changing the speed of battles doesn’t make any change to the outcome.

Umm, no? The “game” portion is about building/designing, assigning orders and min/max distances.

How can you consider watching something you can no longer affect in any way to be a game? When you watch TV, do you also consider that to be a game?

“Skipping” the battle scenes from a game like Gratuitous Space Battles seems to defeat the whole purpose of it. It’s a reason why it’s called Gratuitous Space Battles and why it’s build as it is.

There’s plenty of other games where you can skip the battles and go directly to the outcome.

Bad analogy by the way. With that logic I should only watch the ending of a movie or the last episode of a series.

Bad analogy? You’re really really grasping at straws trying to claim that the graphical battle portion of GSB is any where remotely a “game”. A game stops being a game when you lose all interactivity in the outcome. Because I can show grid mode and change the colors to show enemy combatants and my own team, or move the screen around does make this portion of the program a " game". Just please stop even trying to deny that. Watching the fishbowl move around after you add the fish to it is not a game no matter how many ways you try and spin it; it’s watching the outcome of your manipulation of the game portion of the entire program.

And your logic by the way is kind of bad too. in your analogy of the film to the game - for it to equate to mine with watching the film - you would had to have created the film which you’re watching play out, which I’m sure most people don’t do. And If I did create a film, which I do actually (small indie features) I would indeed watch the finished product because of the time investment and love for the art, and to make sure it all fits together and I’m not missing anything before I show it off to people; nothing of which remotely compares to spending 5 minutes piecing together ships and spending 5 minutes being forced to watch something you have no control over. You’re more than welcome to come up with an even better analogy to try and tell me though why I’m wrong in claiming a game can not be something you have absolute zero control over.

I appreciate the work the team did on the graphics, I just don’t want to be forced to always watch them when there’s no point in the big picture.

Take a moment to chill, guys. Someone calls it a game, someone else doesn’t. We’re all old enough for coherent thought (I assume), so we are all allowed to have different opinions. I think we all need to focus on the point of this thread, rather than arguing semantics.

And just to clarify, I do indeed think the bulk of the pile of code we like to call GSB is a game overall; a good one. I have spent way too many hours on it the past 3 days. Just portions of it - that you are forced to spend a lot of time watching unfortunately with no means to bypass - are not a game.

Sorry for this offtopic, but, when I try to increase the speed of the game, begins to fail, only when there are ships on the screen shooting, each shot is causes a bit of lag, if its a big battle the game stops totally. Same if i try to increase more the speed… In my old machine, this crashes the game, in my new machine not.

My pc data:

Dual core (idk the HD speed, maybe 2 gigahertz?)
2 Gb ram
512 Mb Video card (Nvidia Geforce 9500 or 9800 or something like that)
Gamebooster equiped (i use it only if i really need it)
Monitor LCD 20"

It is a gamer computer, so it should have not problems with games like GSB, maybe with HUGE games with HUGE requeriments.

The game engine and graphics presentation engine are not separate in GSB,
resulting in the fore mentioned behavior.

If you don’t believe me, review the support threads.

look here viewtopic.php?f=21&t=5859

Now it works fine :smiley:

Is it possible for us to have a “Mute” button, so sound data doesn’t get processed at all?

I mean I know I can turn off the sound as is, but it will be nice if I can remove the memory usage as well.

what do you mean memory usage, gsb uses nearly NO memory at all! i can play gsb, chat on msn, play flash games on the internet, play crysis, download torrents (porn lol) and still have alot of about a gig of ram left!

ok not really, but the point is that gsb dont slow down my computer at all!

Personally, I think that Thalic’s idea is right. I mean why else would they call it gratuitous?

It might just be my interpretation though, and I do agree that the metagame would be different.

Which reminds me, if Galactic Conquest is a kind of campaign, wouldn’t that take the gratuitosity or something out of it, since now there is a reason for the battles, not just straight up, space encounters for no apparent reason?

Like I have said, it might be that I view it in a different way. But I have no intentions of buying the metagame if it takes out a third of the title.

I would really like the possibility of a speed increase. especially when you’re in survival mode…know you can make it for at least the first wave, and dont want to wait the 5-10 min (didnt measure it) to sort through them even on 4x. If it’s an easy change, or kinda like the zoom level where an advanced user can go into a text file to change the max, I would be all :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile: