Shortest and longest games?

[mindloss]

I hear stuff in the range of 7-15 hours quoted a lot. I'm curious to hear what some of you report for your typical game times... (which is a bit misleading since apparently many of us spend a good deal of extra time paused. Wonder if the game should track that too!)

I'm also interested to hear if anyone's tried "speed runs"... I know that when I want to have a fun short game, I'll set the AIs to something in diff 1-5 and start on a tiny map. So far my shortest game is still a hair over 3 hours after doing a few of those. Has anyone done it in under an hour? (1/1 probably shouldn't count

And while we're at it, what's the longest game you've had?

[@B0FH]

My shortest 9/9 game has been just shy of 70 minutes, but a typical game for me is 20+ hours. Longest was 48 hours, but I dragged that out a fair bit to ping the 36hour achievement

[mindloss]

9/9 in 70 minutes! What's the approach there?? Rush to ship cap/mk3-4 and just go balls out for the homeworlds?

[@B0FH]

Pretty muchly!  And always picking a high dps ship(s) like the 'leccy bombers.  This was purely for the grinding of the achievements rather than the normal gaming experience though.

[x4000]

If you play defender mode, games can be as short as 15 minutes or so.  But for a regular game, 70 minutes sounds about like a winner to me.

In terms of the longest game ever, that title still belongs to Kalzarius and his friend, I think.  They played a single campaign in 2-player for over 8 months, and took every planet in a 100 planet or 120 planet map.  It was 6/6 AIs, and the AIP at the end of the game was well over 4000.  Given that he was reporting bugs and feature requests periodically all through that 8 months, I have a large number of his savegames at various stages of their campaign.

They were also playing on a 1.6Ghz dual core host for the first 6 months or so, which meant that everything was happening in slow-mo.  That, plus the insane scenario to begin with, were the impetus for of a number of the performance improvement tweaks that everyone now enjoys in the game.  After a while they upgraded to more modern computers and played on at full speed.  I remember them saying that their estimate on total realtime hours played was north of 230.  And their total gametime hours were in the 60s or 80s, I can't remember.


But lately there have been a number of other insanely-high-gametime games coming up.  A number of them have been less time in actual realtime thanks to those players playing in higher speeds, but that still counts.

[Coppermantis]

If you play defender mode, games can be as short as 15 minutes or so.  But for a regular game, 70 minutes sounds about like a winner to me.

In terms of the longest game ever, that title still belongs to Kalzarius and his friend, I think.  They played a single campaign in 2-player for over 8 months, and took every planet in a 100 planet or 120 planet map.  It was 6/6 AIs, and the AIP at the end of the game was well over 4000.  Given that he was reporting bugs and feature requests periodically all through that 8 months, I have a large number of his savegames at various stages of their campaign.

They were also playing on a 1.6Ghz dual core host for the first 6 months or so, which meant that everything was happening in slow-mo.  That, plus the insane scenario to begin with, were the impetus for of a number of the performance improvement tweaks that everyone now enjoys in the game.  After a while they upgraded to more modern computers and played on at full speed.  I remember them saying that their estimate on total realtime hours played was north of 230.  And their total gametime hours were in the 60s or 80s, I can't remember.


But lately there have been a number of other insanely-high-gametime games coming up.  A number of them have been less time in actual realtime thanks to those players playing in higher speeds, but that still counts.

O_o




Anyway, I haven't actually finished a game in a long time. I get a bit in, then get the urge to try some new AI Type, Minor Faction or Bonus ship. I have about six games sitting in my save bin, all in various stages of completion. A few have been going on for several hours though.

[Nalgas]

If I ever get around to going back and finishing it, my current 10-planet game will probably be my shortest by a decent amount.  I think I was on track to win in 3-4 hours total, which is nothing special, but considering how turtly I tend to be, that's fast for me.

My longest so far is 27 hours, and I didn't even win that one.  If I hadn't screwed up where I did, I probably would've won and gotten the 36 hour achievement.  It did take a while, because I don't fast forward much like some people, but I also rarely pause, so I guess it could've been worse.  I can't imagine what a game of that length would be like for one of those people who spends 90% of their time paused obsessing over every little detail.  I'd like to be able to fit more than one or two games in per year, after all.  Heh.