Change Gamespeed midgame

[Gre_Magus]

Would it be difficult to change the game speed (from normal to marathon, for example, or to a new speed) during a game? I'm building a scenario and I want to have a quicker "build-up" phase where the civs can develop cities and build units, but then have a war fought in an "operational phase" where you have multiple turns per year and production and research are slowed down appropriately.

[Willem]

Originally Posted by Gre_Magus

Would it be difficult to change the game speed (from normal to marathon, for example, or to a new speed) during a game?

More than difficult, impossible.

[Gre_Magus]

Why so? Is the game speed xml information only loaded once? Could you not create a function in the DLL to reload it at some point? Or would that break things?

[Willem]

Originally Posted by Gre_Magus

Is the game speed xml information only loaded once?

Yes, at the very start of the game. It can't even be changed by going into the World Builder.

Could you not create a function in the DLL to reload it at some point? Or would that break things?

Well that I'm not sure of. It may be possible to do but I highly doubt it.

[Jarlaxe Baenre]

You could save the game as a world builder save and then modify the gamespeed in there.

[Afforess]

Nonsense, you can change a lot of things mid-game. If you know how to use the SDK, you can compile a dll that checks to see if you are at gamespeed X and if you are, sets the gamespeed to Y. You can do the same with game options, amongst other things. If you have enough time on your hands, you could expose all those functions to python and create an interface where you can change game options, speed settings, difficulty levels, etc... on the fly each turn.

I'd do it, but I have a huge backlog of requests for my mod...

[Gre_Magus]

Thanks for the feedback. I thought more about my request, and I realized that what I'm hoping to achieve may actually more complicated than simply changing the gamespeed, in particular if I want to be able change back and forth in one game. Here's what I mean. On normal, let's say, a unit costs 40 hammers and a given city can put out 20 hammers a turn, so it will take 2 turns to build the unit. Now, if I change gamespeed to "super marathon" (1/10 normal) the unit will cost 400 hammers, and should take 20 turns to build. The city building it puts 20 hammers into it each turn, building up a total of 200 after 10 turns. Then all of the sudden, the gamespeed changes back to normal, and, if I understand correctly, the cost of the unit will go back to 40. The unit would then be finished immediately and give 160 hammers of overflow that can be dumped in a wonder or something. So what I would need to do is adjust the production (and food, science, culture, and gold) that was gained during the "slow" period back down to the "fast period" ratio (i.e, in my example, divide it by 10), so that the city has 20 hammers in the queue, not 200. It might be easier to actually penalize production (and research, etc.) during the slow period, instead of altering the costs, but that would cause all kinds of rounding problems. I guess this is actually more difficult than I thought.