PlanetsCentral

However there is one thing which made it a little unconfortable: The total length was 398:39 time units which took me about 15 minutes to watch it until the end. This was the best I was able to achieve by pressing "+" for the highest speed available. It seems that CCBSim is going through the whole battle in real-time whereas PVCR (and VPA) is "jumping" from action to action.

You probably saw a weak planet vs. weak ship? (for example, Deadalus-with-Kill-o-Zap vs. Planet-with-1-defense). Those fights take ages to resolve with AllowAlternativeCombat=Yes (in PVCR and FLAK). Because the weapons are so weak, they only do very little damage and need many shots; to add to that, they also recharge slowly.

CCBSim has a fast-forward-to-end function (Ctrl+Right), so if you know it's gonna be boring, you can use that to just see the result. It still takes a while to compute in a DOS emulator.

In the 32-bit version (PlayVCR/PCC2), Ctrl+Right forwards in 20s increments.

As far as I know, PVCR does not behave different here, but it might be that the DOS emulator treats it a little friendlier because it has much simpler user interface.

VPA only supports Tim-Host combat which (a) resolves much faster because each hit does at least 1 damage, and (b) is time-limited to 2000 ticks. It will therefore sure appear faster, but produce totally different results.

--Stefan