How fast are the speeds?
Europa Universalis V is a real-time grand strategy game. Whenever you’re unpaused time constantly ticks forward. Most events happen when months roll over, but those are still divided in days and further into 12 ticks. Ticks are the smallest unit of time in EU5 and are essentially hours, but skipping the night. So it goes 8am, 9am, …, 6pm, 7pm, 8am, etc.
When you change the game speed, you change how long the game waits before processing the next tick. So speed 1 waits one second after every tick before processing the next tick. However, it’s easiest to tick in terms of days.
The game speeds therefore aim for the following:
- 12 sec/day
- 5 sec/day
- 1 sec/day
- 5 days/sec
- ∞ days/sec
Note though that those are just what it aims for. Speed 5 removes any delay and just lets your computer constantly process, but my computer can still only process about 7 days per second. Also, the month rollover always takes a good while longer. So on speed 4, the rest of the month should take roughly 6 seconds, but the month rollover will add a few seconds at the end of each. Yet it will depend on your computer’s specifications how close to these speeds you will get. I have seen others with high-end computers get up to 17 days/sec, with barely a second for the month change. It all depends on how fast your CPU can handle the calculations the game needs to do.