Is this normal?

[Volatar]

So a friend and I are playing a two player campaign. Literally the first planet he scouts next to his homeworld turns out to be an IV world (Tristana on the map)   and then we discover an ARS two hops away from home, in Reimu.

A couple hours later we take a look at the map, and find that we are literally walled in by tech III and IV worlds.

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/576674059591716989/E7F0395289ED65E1CA8EF19A2B9E162348188DD2/

This is an 80 planet map with all 3 expansions enabled (including Golems and Spirecraft, but not the Spire Plot), and the AI's at 6 and 7 (orange and red respectively).

Is it normal for the map to be this heavily fortified and compact? It's really tough and slow-going at this point. We have spent the last two hours of gametime neutering planets. (And about twice as much real time, as even at the lowest performance profile the latency between us is so high as to make the game run at 50%-67% speed all the time. We are basically on opposite sides of the world though, me in Raleigh North Carolina (hi Chris!) and him in rural Japan. It's pretty remarkable that we are able to play together at all. Oh the wonders of modern technology.  

[keith.lamothe]

That sounds like a particularly vicious random seed, so not normal, but definitely possible.  You sure you haven't done anything to offend your computers lately?

[Volatar]

You sure you haven't done anything to offend your computers lately?

Well, I guess it do keep it online 24/7 and push it to its processing limit playing AI War 4 hours a day and then push it to its absolute limit playing League of Legends another 6 hours a day.

This laptop wasn't made for power, but I am using all the power it's got.

Yeah, I guess it could very well be mad at me 

Anyways, so if thats just a sucky seed, than thats fine.

However, I could still use some help on the slowness problem. I know AI War used to have a configurable delay, which seems to have been replaced by this performance profile thing. Only problem is that the lowest setting isn't low enough for our purposes. As TBS players the both of us we don't mind long input delays, but it is kinda annoying how slow the game is running at current. Any way to make it faster?

[Orelius]

By any chance, could you tell us the seed?  I think that this map would be rather interesting.

[Echo35]

I've seen stuff like this happen before, but usually only on maps with small numbers of jump points (I had a map once, can't remember the type, but my home world only had two exits and both were Mk. IV planets).

[Oralordos]

However, I could still use some help on the slowness problem. I know AI War used to have a configurable delay, which seems to have been replaced by this performance profile thing. Only problem is that the lowest setting isn't low enough for our purposes. As TBS players the both of us we don't mind long input delays, but it is kinda annoying how slow the game is running at current. Any way to make it faster?

I believe that it was ctrl-(+/-) to adjust the input delays. I found it useful for when playing across the world as well.

[Volatar]

By any chance, could you tell us the seed?  I think that this map would be rather interesting.

Here you go

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/576674232709891108/9FA9A71A0B316DE8A23F5D21C86633F62E8370F6/

[Red Spot]

By any chance, could you tell us the seed?  I think that this map would be rather interesting.

Remember that certain AI-types can change a map
(When you say turn on Golems, planetary improvements may spawn at different planets in different combinations, select a 'planetary improvement'-AI and it happens as well. Not exactly sure how and when but except for the actual planet-layout things may shift a bit here and there.)