I was curious about timing: much of the mid- and late-game is going to be heavily slowed if you do not have a top-tier CPU. Have we ever thought about changing run timing from wall time to in-game time? Cities Skylines is as much a benchmark for your CPU as it is a game. This would allow folks with anything but top-tier computers to still compete, and wouldn't require folks that want to be/remain competitive to get the latest hardware every year. I checked the forums but didn't see if this had been discussed.

Asking because I ran into this during practice and my actual run. I completed my shortest wall-clock run on a friend's gaming computer (in 1h 45m), which ended on May 20th 2028 in game. However, my shortest practice run which I did on my budget gaming laptop this weekend was a 2h 45m run, but ended on Dec. 25th 2027 in-game. I feel like I need to ask for myself and the people that shouldn't have to, or can't play on a $2000+ machine to be competitive.

Do you mean the date timer on the bottom left? Sorry, but no, that won't be something I'll implement. Pausing the game or playing on the slower settings would allow you to basically speedrun in slow mo, which defeats the purpose.

I think I understand your point, but I'm not positive I agree. I would argue that if someone completes the game by <some in-game date>, even if they have to pause or run the game slowly, they still will have demonstrated the skill to complete the final milestone by that <in-game date>, a demonstration of pure skill and not how much they paid for a CPU.

I just want to make sure I'm making the risk with how we're doing timing now as clear as I can here:

Cities Skylines is as much a CPU benchmark as it is a game. We're essentially saying "anyone not running with the latest Intel i9 or Ryzen 9 series processor will most likely be unable to compete in PC runs" purely because a day of in-game time is going to process faster on a faster CPU.

An actual example: I had an almost 40% speed increase from my laptop with an i5 processor, when I moved to my friend's computer with a modern Ryzen 9 processor.

It is extremely unlikely anyone will be able to compete that isn't using a top-shelf computer. Further, folks that had a lot of skill that set a record a few years ago may lose their spot simply because new runners will have new computers that are better and could run the game faster, not because of their skill.

In a real way this is risking being pay-to-win, and not much less focused on skill-based capability.

I just want to make sure that if we're insisting that we do timing based only on wall-times, that we're doing so understanding the implications around the CPU.

If there were a way to account for lag, then I'm all ears. There are many games where there's an in-game timer that players use because it doesn't run during screen transitions or whatever. But I haven't a clue how to do something like this in C:S.