At the start of the game I have 1 point in science infrastructure, there are 20 ticks per cycle in this game, and research points equal to the value of my science infrastructure are generated once per tick; therefore I generate 20 research points per cycle.
The cost of the first level of technology is 144 research points, at 20 research points per cycle it should take me 7 cycles and 4 ticks to reach 144 however the predicted completion date displayed in game is “6d2s” which I initially read as 6 cycles 2 ticks.
I’m assuming the game’s estimation timer is starting to count from 0, counting the completion of the first cycle as cycle 0, the second as cycle 1, etc and the “2s” is actually 0.2 cycles, so 4 ticks.
I was wondering if this interpretation is correct, and if so, if the presentation of this information can be changed to be a little more intuitive.
6d 2s should be read as just 6 days and 2 seconds.
The seconds are a fuge I made ages ago to indicate the tech upgrades are the last thing to happen in a tick so that if you have a combat in exactly 6 hours, the weapons will not come online until 2 seconds after it.
6 days is 144 1 hour ticks.
I would actually like to get rid of the whole ticks and cycles thing one day, its unnecessary and confusing.
Thank you that does answer my question about how to read the timer and I’m glad you’re planning to do away with cycles in the long term (I think) but right now I think that timer is unintuitive. I don’t think it’s uncommon to mentally equate 1 cycle with 1 day no matter how long the cycle really is and If a player can set the length of a cycle having the research ETA always count in 24 tick days is not useful and potentially unclear.
I think either the text description could be changed to make this a little more clear or, ideally, have the ETA dynamically adjust to the number of ticks per cycle in game as that in the more important unit of time for the player.
For example, when all cycles where 24 hours you knew that if the research ETA said you would have banking in 3 days that your extra level in banking would be in effect just before production was counted on day 4, in a game where the number of ticks per cycle is not 24 you can no longer be confident of that at a glance.