Game Time
The game operates on a clock that updates every 30 seconds, referred to as a "tick". This means the game values are updated every 30 seconds.
To enhance the gaming experience, game time is significantly faster than real-time. There are 8 in-game days in a real-time day and an in-game year has only 72 in-game days. The following table shows the conversion between ticks, in-game time, and real-time:
| Real Time | In-game Time | Game Ticks |
|---|---|---|
| 30 sec | 4 min | 1 |
| 8 min | 1 hour | 15 |
| 3 hours | 1 day / 24h | 360 |
| 18 hours | 1 month / 6d | 2160 |
| 9 days | 1 year / 12m | 25920 |
| 3 months | 10 years | 259200 |
All durations in the game are given in in-game time and in some cases the equivalent real time might be indicated in parenthesis
Weather Simulation
The current in-game weather conditions, consisting of solar iradiance, wind speed and river discharge rates are displayed on the Dashboard. The weather is simulated with the intention of providing a realistic representation of the real weather conditions.
Solar Irradiance
The solar irradiance is used to calculate the electricity production of solar power facilities.
Solar irradiance is the power per unit area received from the sun and is measured in watts per square meter (W/m²). The solar irradiance is influenced by the time of day, the season, the geographical location and the cloud coverage of the sky. The seasonal, diurnal and geographical influence can be modelled with a clear sky irradiance model, however the cloud coverage is much more stochastic. The game generates a three dimentional perlin noise moving in time to simulate the moving clouds with some regions with high cloud coverage and some with low or no cloud coverage. The following image shows how this cloud coverage over the map looks like.
When a facility is built, a random location inside the player's tile is attributed to the facility. This means that each solar power facility has a different solar irradiance value.
Wind Speed
The wind speed is used to calculate the electricity production of wind power facilities.
The wind speed is given in kilometers per hour (km/h) and varies with different frequencies. In the game it is modelled with a tree dimentional perlin noise superposed with a sinusoidal function to simulate the daily and seasonal variations. In general the wind is stronger during the night and in winter than during the day and in summer but the exact values are random and vary from one location to another.
River Discharge
The river discharge is used to calculate the electricity production of hydropower facilities.
The river discharge is given in cubic meters per second (m³/s) and varies seasonally (see figure).