Okay, let's talk about a frustration I have running the game: Dosbox default cycles.

My WR run was extremely lucky, both AI players founded one city then didn't manage to expand. This happens sometimes and I am not sure if there's a deterministic way (apart from setting the clock as random seed, which is another topic).

This is the ideal situation, but it happens rarely. There's a way to notice it around mid-run: waiting times between turns. At least it is with a dosbox set to 3000 cycles.

Depending on the AI they can expand and find you (that is basically run over at that point), though I have the hypothesis that you can still get a really good times if the turns were a lot faster when they expand / fight each other.

I'd propose an increase in dosbox cycles, ideally to a fixed value. I don't like it when the people with the fastest hardware get an unfair advantage.

I'd go with something resembling a fast 486 machine. Maybe around 12-20k cycles.

OK, Jenny, I'll look into it. And I'm going to out myself as a moron, but I picked 3000 because I believed that it would level the playing field for people with slower computers. But if you think a higher clock speed is what will more balance it out, I'll see to it that it will change. I'd make all the old runs into some kind of legacy category and new runs would be at the higher speed.

I'm playing with a x230 machine, about 10 years old. For most games, 15-18k cycles works absolutely fine even when I record stuff via obs (instead of dosbox which I usually do for speedruns)

I have another suggestion if we end up with more categories.

I'd like to experiment with setting the time exactly for RNG manipulation. I did a bit of research in how the game functions in my free time, trying to reverse engineer the game. The random seed is set by the system clock (date + time), but after the preloader is finished (the 3 screens that configures display, sound and input device). I found that it is hard to do this by a batch script and time it correctly, but I got some success having the same seed in a bunch of tries.

I bet there's a way to get the timer set exactly when the main game loads (and this will be super interesting to make a TAS run of).

I think using a tool to manipulate the RNG by setting a seed should be allowed in separate category, with the rule of posting the method and exact date/timestamp used with the video.