Hello everybody,

So I assume that this is best place to voice my concerns to the moderators.

Firstly, to cut a long story short; I consider myself an expert on this game. I'm primarily from the multiplayer scene and run a YouTube channel dedicated to the game. Recently I've gotten into speedrunning it and have spent 100+ hours practicing/optimizing on Twitch.

Clearly there hasn't (yet ;) ) been much of a competitive scene for running this game which likely explains why the following hasn't been flagged up yet.

Basically, AOE3 has an unlocked framerate, this means that the game/timer plays back at variable speeds depending on system specs and selected graphics settings. In multiplayer the game/timer is synced to the same speed for all players so it remains competitive. Fore speedruning in singleplayer though, it's not competitive. Effectively, the more FPS I can eek out of my system, the faster my speedrun will be - simple as that. The first mission of act 2 involves waiting for a 15 minute timer to expire and I managed to do to do it in 10m30s or something silly just by interacting with my colony as little as possible and managing it mostly with hotkeys whilst I rested my screen over an unexplored black are of the map which resulted in 500fps (compared to ~120 anywhere else on the screen).

Therefore a fully optimized run would utilize minimum graphics (which I hate) and your GPU would have to be SLI Titans or something (which very few people are able to own, including me) otherwise you're at a disadvantage. This is why I'd like to propose rule changes. And I think think there's two ways to go about it.

1. The first and perhaps most obvious solution is to use INGAME time for the runs like a lot of other runs do; the ingame timer is brought up via the f11 hotkey. All submitted times ought to be the sum of ingame timers for each mission (a mission ends when the you are victorious text appears as described by the current rules). If this change was implemented then ideally loadtimes and cutscene nonscence should be excluded from the run time (load times also vary depending on PC specs, a slower PC would take longer to load the missions and would unfairly make the run longer).

2. The second way to go about this also puts everyone on 99% of a level playing field whilst continuing to use real time. Simply checking 'enable vsnyc' option in the graphics menu locks the game to 60FPS. If everyone ran at 60FPS then the game/timer would play at the same speed for everyone (I assume, I'll test this with some friends and make another post later). The problem with this option though is that the by 'locked to 60FPS' what I actually mean is that the game playsback somewhere between a constantly variable 55 - 59.9 fps. Therefore to get this as close to 60 at all times, I'd have to run the lowest graphics settings which is something I despise doing as a YouTuber.

So I'll leave this here and hopefully a mod will get back to me. I've really been enjoying optimizing the speedrun but actually lost all my enthusiasm when I realized this FPS thing.

Thanks, Interjection youtube.com/interjectionvideos twitch.tv/interjectionvideos

I'm definitely no expert at AoE3; I mostly deal with AoE1 and AoE2. Still though, there are issues with using in-game time for such runs, because then you'd have to deal with menu times (in campaign runs), and pause abuse and whatnot. It's better to not have to add a bunch of arbitrary restrictions to in-game time and just continue using real time.

For now, I'll add "60 FPS cap / VSync" as a rule to AoE3. Sorry to hear that you'd still have to set the graphics to low for VSync for extra "advantage" though, cause otherwise that'd be a pretty good option. When it comes to external framerate limiting programs, though, I'm not too sure if I'd want to permit using DXtory and whatnot to cap it to a solid 60 without VSync yet, so I'll just leave it at that for now.