I'm worried about the time scale of Stellaris

[Krajzen]

Stellaris is going to depict far future and dramatic changes in the galaxy, where numerous species go from the edge of a spaceflight (or, in case of minor species, even lower position) to the imperial control of dozens, potentially hundreds of star systems. That's cool, but I still don't get how does it fit the time scale of a game, which has been once stated by a dev to go from hour to hour.

(I cannot find this post; IIRC the dev has said they are not sure yet [sic] but it is going to be hour-to-hour or day-to-day)

Am I the only one who thinks this is way too small scale for interstellar grand strategy game played on the scale of a galaxy?
The only Paradox game which goes hour-to-hour is HoI series which depict only between 10 and 20 years of time around WW2, concentrated on detailed warfare. But we are talking about the game where you are going to travel through billions of kilometres of space (even with FTL it is going to be a big deal), discover dozens of planets and colonise them from scratch to presumably hundreds of millions or billions of inhabitants, and all of that is happening hour to hour? Did I get something wrong? To be honest even day-to-day scale like EU4 has (380 years of lenght) seems to be not enough, as eu4 doesn't depict building worlds from scratch and travelling through distances millions times longer, and massive changes interplanetary populations face and...

Personally I'd have no problem with something like 1-5 seconds = 1 week, though maybe that's a bit too fast...

 

[Hapchazzard]

I agree. HOI3's timespan was a little longer than 10 years. Stellaris' timespan is likely to be several centuries. The game pace being in hours at the slowest acceleration would be cool, I guess, but I am pretty sure it would be seldom used outside of moments with intense and important battles.

 

[13Foxtrot]

Stellaris is going to depict far future and dramatic changes in the galaxy, where numerous species go from the edge of a spaceflight (or, in case of minor species, even lower position) to the imperial control of dozens, potentially hundreds of star systems. That's cool, but I still don't get how does it fit the time scale of a game, which has been once stated by a dev to go from hour to hour.

(I cannot find this post; IIRC the dev has said they are not sure yet [sic] but it is going to be hour-to-hour or day-to-day)

Am I the only one who thinks this is way too small scale for interstellar grand strategy game played on the scale of a galaxy?
The only Paradox game which goes hour-to-hour is HoI series which depict only between 10 and 20 years of time around WW2, concentrated on detailed warfare. But we are talking about the game where you are going to travel through billions of kilometres of space (even with FTL it is going to be a big deal), discover dozens of planets and colonise them from scratch to presumably hundreds of millions or billions of inhabitants, and all of that is happening hour to hour? Did I get something wrong? To be honest even day-to-day scale like EU4 has (380 years of lenght) seems to be not enough, as eu4 doesn't depict building worlds from scratch and travelling through distances millions times longer, and massive changes interplanetary populations face and...

Personally I'd have no problem with something like 1-5 seconds = 1 week, though maybe that's a bit too fast...

Don't remember if they have something posted on this but hour by hour should be fine especially for the slowest speed.....top speed could be a day or a week which would be fine as well......a ship combat would freeze time and you could view the combat in 'combat speed' which may be real time which, in turn, wouldn't really affect the game.

 

[Zarine]

I think it was something like 10 ticks = 1 day

Anyway, the issue of timing is larget than you might think. With sci-fi weapon, you could destroy a planet in a matter of minutes. Thus, having time go by weeks doesn't seem right.
On the other hand, colonizing and raising the pop will take years...

So that's the main issue of the timing...

 

[Denkt]

Day by day works fine, it works for EUIV so why not for Stellaris? Not to slow nor to fast.

 

[Velorian]

Yeah it's also my chief worry right now. I'd prefer a game to span several centuries, even a millennia. Those hours need to be calculated really, really fast.

Don't remember if they have something posted on this but hour by hour should be fine especially for the slowest speed.....top speed could be a day or a week which would be fine as well......a ship combat would freeze time and you could view the combat in 'combat speed' which may be real time which, in turn, wouldn't really affect the game.

Would that work for multiplayer though? I don't much care about that, but the devs do.

 

[fletcherreed]

Full timelines of each (current gen) paradox game
EU4 Ticks: 137,373
CK2 Ticks: around 250,000
Victoria II: around 36,000
HOI3: around 105,000

If we assume 10 ticks per day for Stellaris, and 365 days per year, if we use CK2's numbers:
250,000 ticks = 68.5 years.

 

[Hapchazzard]

Full timelines of each (current gen) paradox game
EU4 Ticks: 137,373
CK2 Ticks: around 250,000
Victoria II: around 36,000
HOI3: around 105,000

If we assume 10 ticks per day for Stellaris, and 365 days per year, if we use CK2's numbers:
250,000 ticks = 68.5 years.

I really hope it isn't just 70 years. I mean, the game follows the political development of a galaxy from a desolate place with just a few civilizations that have barely grasped spaceflight to a sprawling island in Universe whose civilizations have reached a very high level of sophistication and development. And for that, just 70 years? If you ask me, that's like having a game that follows civilization develop from the stone age to the atomic era and make it less than a hundred years long...

 

[Denkt]

Do the game even have a time limit to start with as it is not historical constrained?

 

[fletcherreed]

I really hope it isn't just 70 years. I mean, the game follows the political development of a galaxy from a desolate place with just a few civilizations that have barely grasped spaceflight to a sprawling island in Universe whose civilizations have reached a very high level of sophistication and development. And for that, just 70 years? If you ask me, that's like having a game that follows civilization develop from the stone age to the atomic era and make it less than a hundred years long...

I think we'll see performance enhancements on Stellaris compared to older titles, so maybe double that number to be fair?

 

[*Aqua*]

If we assume 10 ticks per day for Stellaris, and 365 days per year, if we use CK2's numbers:
250,000 ticks = 68.5 years.

You assume that there's an end date. I'm not so sure about that.

But yeah, 1 tick/day is probably enough.

 

[Daddl]

Where do you get that hours or 10 ticks per day from? The one screenshot in Diary #4 does not show anything else than year, month and day, most likely the normal calendar. So if it runs by day, it will be just like EU4 and CK2, with the improved performance I expect spanning easily up to a 1000 years. And I got the feeling there will be no arbitrary end date in this game.

 

[Hapchazzard]

Where do you get that hours or 10 ticks per day from? The one screenshot in Diary #4 does not show anything else than year, month and day, most likely the normal calendar. So if it runs by day, it will be just like EU4 and CK2, with the improved performance I expect spanning easily up to a 1000 years.

Next to the day, there is a number in brackets(in the dev diary it was 9, I think).

 

[*Aqua*]

@Daddl
A dev wrote some time ago that they have 10 ticks per day atm. But that number could change.

 

[fletcherreed]

Where do you get that hours or 10 ticks per day from? The one screenshot in Diary #4 does not show anything else than year, month and day, most likely the normal calendar. So if it runs by day, it will be just like EU4 and CK2, with the improved performance I expect spanning easily up to a 1000 years. And I got the feeling there will be no arbitrary end date in this game.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-time-tick-in-stellaris.875861/#post-19776636

 

[Daddl]

Oh well, that thread. Too long ago for my old brain I guess

But here you are assuming that every tick actually does something if you compare it like that to EU4/CK2 days. If a day has 10 ticks, they likely won't do more than allowing more precise movement and battle length, while every re-calculation of all the other statistics are rather done daily, weekly or monthly.

I'm perfectly fine if they change to daily ticks, CK2 shows that 700 and more years are possible, and that appears to be a quite reasonable timeframe - as reasonable as a real-time game is able to represent galaxy settling which in most science-fiction rather takes tens of thousands of years. Whereas the conquest of an already settled galaxy can be pretty fast.

Well, I have no idea, so lets wait for the DD covering that.

 

[RoboticManiac]

I'm okay with either days or hours.

Though if the game takes roughly the amount of time it takes to play HoI, I going to feel somewhat awkward for having commuted genocide against entire species, colonising the entire galaxy and having crushed innumerable rebellions all the whole making incredible scientific advances within the space of 20 odd years.

 

[Tim_Ward]

If you look at the screenshot of the galaxy map with all the empires on it you can see it actually shows what appear to be six speeds, not five.

Now I've only played EU4 so I don't know if maybe some other paradox games have 6 speeds but it seems maybe they're going for an even more granular experience WRT to the passage of time, i.e. there's a new extra slow motion option and the game still takes place over centuries.

 

[Wulfburk]

Full timelines of each (current gen) paradox game
EU4 Ticks: 137,373
CK2 Ticks: around 250,000
Victoria II: around 36,000
HOI3: around 105,000

If we assume 10 ticks per day for Stellaris, and 365 days per year, if we use CK2's numbers:
250,000 ticks = 68.5 years.

I guess that feeling i had of Vicky 2 being a lot shorter than all the others was quite right! Sadly so... since Vicky 2 is the best of them all

 

[Zyrious]

I have to agree, hour by hour makes no sense in Stellaris. Hell, Gal Civ uses weekly turns. This is also suppose to be a GSG, not a RTS, so it should be hitting a bigger scale than a regular 4x, not a smaller one. I think stellaris would work best on the same time-scale as CK 2 or EU IV, because it most assuredly is operating on a similar, or even larger, scale. I see no reason for hourly ticks, we should have each tick be a day like the aforementioned games. I think that would work out best and allows for a much more realistic development over time.