The manual specifically states that each turn is one year on the clock and that there's a specific progression to each turn regarding neutral and enemy movements, notifications, and player movements (page 19), but I keep seeing behaviors that suggest otherwise. I feel really foolish about this lack of understanding so I hope it's ok to really go into detail about the behaviors in question. My confusion began to set in when using my Formers to build improvements around my first base; I would find that improvements that should have taken several turns to complete would be completed while I sent units around to explore. The explorer unit would move and then I'd get a notification that this 4 turn improvement was finished and my Former needed to know what to make next. My fascination with the overall game (I can already tell this game is amazing) outweighed my confusion at the time, but as the game went on, more time related confusion began to occur. I started to get into technologies, which have a very concrete interval between the discoveries of technologies, but just like with the improvements, halfway through sending my units around, I'd get a notification that a technology with a multiple turn wait time has been discovered without a single turn going by. I looked down at the mission year section of the UI and saw to my utter confusion that somehow 40 years (40 turns right?) had gone by. I realize these games are infamous for making a mockery of people's time, but this was ridiculous. I knew for a fact I hadn't clicked the END TURN prompt on the UI 40 times so this time, I selected a unit in order to move it with my eyes glued on the mission year section. As I clicked to send my unit on its way, the mission year section hopped from 2140 to 2143 and once again another improvement miraculously completes...what the hell is going on? My utter confusion comes from the fact that at least in the most recent Civilization titles, there's a very clear distinction between turns: units can only move so much, all the tickers for technology and build times go down only between clicks of the END TURN button, and all notifications for completion of in progress projects only come up at the beginning of each turn after clicking END TURN. I can't find any information on the passage of time in this game other than the manual referenced at the beginning of this post. Somebody please help me; there are other aspects of this game that really confused me, but I was able to work through what I wasn't understanding. This, however, has me stumped. Is this like technology progress where I can only make direct choices between technologies if I make it so through the settings? Does time pass without my direct consent if I send units on multiple turn journeys since time skips seem to happen when I do that?

It would help tremendously if you could post your game settings.

:)

There's an option called "pause at the end of the turn" in the preferences menu which if I'm not mistaken is turned off by default. Press Ctrl+P and select it, this should probably fix the time-skipping issue.

This is true in quite a lot of older 4x games, for some reason. I really don't understand why developers thought it was a good idea.

Quote of the century....

"I really don't understand why developers thought it was a good idea?"

Yea, um usually when someone thinks crazy shit, it is for a reason.... drugs, insanity, girlfriend trouble etc etc, you know, all human decision making can be quantified scientifically.

but can science explain why developers occasionally think these things? Perfectly reasonable intelligent people thinking something like this is a good idea? No, we cannot explain it, its a mystery of the universe, it truly is!

Pausing the game at the end of the turn is disabled by default. Showing the projected odds of combat is disabled by default. Did Firaxis want to confuse and alienate new players unnecessarily when they set up the default game settings? Was it a higher up corporate decision to avoid making the game seem slow and tedious to casual first time players, instead making the first play attempt flow almost like an RTS with no warning signs telling you that you need to prepare better for combat? I bet we should blame corporate, just like how real-time combat was forced upon Arcanum to appease players outside the genre target audience.

Oh i just remembered something else incredibly dumb they did with SMAC....

The game was deliberately designed to be future proof.... 'proof' as in, forbidden to function!!!!

anyone remember the old "cpu not supported" popup?

In actual fact, the game would run if that popup was not in the way.

So that was someones idea to do that. I wonder who and why?