The biggest one I've ever played

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oond
Space Krill
Posts: 8
Joined: Sat Dec 31, 2016 11:46 pm

The biggest one I've ever played

#1 Post by oond »

So I've played well over a hundred games at 100-300 systems, including a round a couple of months ago at 250 systems, 20 AIs, once as each starting species. My latest quest took so much work (as in 10-15 minute wait times between turns) I figured I'd come share it.

1k systems, start as egassem, 40 AIs... my 250 system games took 200-250 turns to win, with one exception, I snuck one in in 198. Was very surprised to get 1k done in under 400.
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oond
Space Krill
Posts: 8
Joined: Sat Dec 31, 2016 11:46 pm

Re: The biggest one I've ever played

#2 Post by oond »

Some notes on giant game:

- Lag peaked around turn 300, when I was fighting on the most fronts at once. Unsure if that's related, but it calmed down slightly as I closed in on the last quarter of the map
- autosaves were >160MB, and I found 20GB or so sitting in freeorion.log, freeoriond.log, and AI_##.log. I cleared it out the logs midgame and it improved speed a bit
- The worst lag was when interacting with the build queue, I suppose it's to be expected when you're doing ridiculous things like hitting ctrl-A in the objects window and queueing 200+ items at once, probably ended up with over 1000 items in the build queue at the height
- I'm glad I did it and I'll never do it again =]

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Vezzra
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Re: The biggest one I've ever played

#3 Post by Vezzra »

That's... crazy. You actually finished a 1k systems map with 40 AIs. I'm thoroughly impressed... what are your system specs? My Mac would crumble if I tried playing such a huge game.

But it's nice to hear that FO is sufficiently stable that you can pull off a stunt like this. 8)

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MatGB
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Re: The biggest one I've ever played

#4 Post by MatGB »

Vezzra wrote:That's... crazy. You actually finished a 1k systems map with 40 AIs. I'm thoroughly impressed... what are your system specs? My Mac would crumble if I tried playing such a huge game.

But it's nice to hear that FO is sufficiently stable that you can pull off a stunt like this. 8)
Agree on both counts, my laptop might manage it but I doubt it, plus I'd get fed up with lag.

@Oond: try the most recent Test build, there's been some backend work on lag, especially in and about the production window, that appears to have improved things substantially—it won't be compatible with a 0.4.6 savegame but a new game of whatever size should, mostly, run better.

I am impressed, really, I wouldn't have the patience.

On the other hand, when I have played bigger games I've always found that once you've got between 1/3rd and 1/2 the map/AIs conquered the steamroller speeds up so you can fight on virtually all fronts at the same time.
Mat Bowles

Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

oond
Space Krill
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Joined: Sat Dec 31, 2016 11:46 pm

Re: The biggest one I've ever played

#5 Post by oond »

Vezzra wrote:That's... crazy. You actually finished a 1k systems map with 40 AIs. I'm thoroughly impressed... what are your system specs? My Mac would crumble if I tried playing such a huge game.
MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013), 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
MatGB wrote:@Oond: try the most recent Test build, there's been some backend work on lag, especially in and about the production window, that appears to have improved things substantially—it won't be compatible with a 0.4.6 savegame but a new game of whatever size should, mostly, run better.

I am impressed, really, I wouldn't have the patience.

On the other hand, when I have played bigger games I've always found that once you've got between 1/3rd and 1/2 the map/AIs conquered the steamroller speeds up so you can fight on virtually all fronts at the same time.
I will give it a shot. I'm not sure I'll finish one again but I'll try starting one and see how far I get before it becomes a problem. Yeah, I'm used to lag recovering a bit midgame, at this size it didn't recover nearly as much, proportionally, as it does in smaller "large" games (300-400 systems).

It took about two weeks, off and on, mostly while sitting watching TV with my lady - spend 90 seconds or so playing a turn, click next turn, put the laptop on the end table to grind on it for 10-15 minutes. The really painful parts were queueing from the objects window. At the height I queued 217 terraforms right before bed and it instantly beachballed, I left it overnight and it still wasn't done adding them to the queue when I woke up, it was that afternoon when it finished. I was over 150k production at that point so I just stopped modifying my colonies any more at that point, wasn't worth the effort. Found the honeycomb around then which gave me a nice boost.

In defense of the huge game, I will say it is deeply satisfying to queue attack and troop ships in stacks of 99 and still have plenty of production left over. =D

dbenage-cx
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Re: The biggest one I've ever played

#6 Post by dbenage-cx »

If you do run a very large game again, instead of manually deleting the logs you could set the log-level to ERROR in config.xml (or on command-line with --log-level ERROR).
Won't produce useful logs if an issue arises of course, but should reduce some of the lag for setups like this.

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