How can I speed up turn calculation in single player games?

Question

The game's single player mode runs unbearably slowly for me. Each turn takes minutes to calculate, and the time always seem to be the same, even when there are no enemies on the field, such as during the last turn on the third battle in the campaign, where you're suppose to escort someone out of a level.

Does the game offload its calculations to an external server? Is there any preferences I can make to speed things up? I assume the game is CPU bound, but does it take advantage of multiple cores?

Answer 1

The game does not offload calculations to an external server. AI work all takes place in a single thread, so multiple cores isn't much help there.

In the options, there is a setting to allow the AI to do calculations while you are planning (though it may be on by default?).

You can also check the console.log file (just inside the "--------- Initializing Common ---------" section) to see what is being used to render the graphics. Is it software, or OpenGL?

If the slowness is due to graphics rendering, you can try turning off the animated background.

According to developer Jimmeh, there have been many improvements to the AI calculations as part of development of the iPad version of Frozen Synapse. Those will be ported back to the PC version at some point, but probably not for several months.