Pike's Industrial Complex

Hey guys,

Today I have been playing Legacy, Tempest, and Wraith against Plague Rat in Pike's Industrial Complex on iOS.

i was playing on my 2nd generation iPad (from 2010?), so granted it's not state of the art now in 2015, but I was noticing some major slowdowns in the game.  And yes, I have played this configuration many times over, and I keep seeing the same slowdown occur.

When the environment is full of vats, Wraith has 2-3 Megacomputers out, and ... This seems to be the key, Tempest has Shielding Winds out.

i can wait up to fifteen minutes for a single update to an attack from the rat onto Tempest.  I think one time it took an hour for all the vats and rats to attack just 1 round!  It's almost unplayable.

Well, I figured it might be just be my hardware.  So I today went out and bought a state of the art IPad Air 2.  This is the fastest iPad Apple currently sells.  This is probably on the order of 4-10x faster than my old iPad.

The new hardware does run faster, but once vats and rats and shielding winds come out, the game slows to a crawl.  In fact, I am composing this message on my old iPad while I am running on the new hardware just waiting for the environment to finish its turn.  It still hasn't.

Let me be clear.., I love this game!  So much that I was willing to fork out the bucks for a new iPad so I could avoid the slowdown.  It's slightly better, but it's still unplayable!  It is currently taken 10? 15? Minutes for the environment to play and it's still not done!

if I were to guess, it feels like some n^2 algorithm for iterating through the cards that may affect the environment. (Are you trying all combinations?  Is it computing symbolically?)  The worst offender seems to be shielding winds: it goes from slow updates to unplayably slow updates.

Please please please fix this.  It is unplayable in this configuration (and shielding winds is important to surviving the environment, esp. When the vat comes out that destroys all other vats)

Am I the only one seeing this?

 Thanks for letting me vent.

i really do love the game and want it fixed so I can continue playing.