Up now. Sorry if I wasted any of your time.

The first step for scaling the delays will be a single scale multiplier that will be applied equally to all delays in the game. I'd like to find a solid set of baseline delays that people are comfortable with, and then allow gameops to scale those delays uniformly in order to decrease CPU load. I'd also like to provide the ability to customize these delays individually, but there are currently 162 of them (and I might have missed a few) and it would take a lot of work to add TEDIT support for that many new fields. There may be another way to handle that, outside of TEDIT, like an INI file or something. I think there's value in having something like that because as the game continues to evolve, I think gameops could better address balance issues if they could modify the pacing of individual actions like this. I just don't think I'll have that in as a feature immediately. A game-wide scale setting I could do right away, though.

I'm going to explore the handling of ship lists for xport because I don't think it necessarily should increase much in CPU for multiple ships.

Something that we have to factor in here is that whenever there is a break in the input stream, you could have an injection of additional delay. There are two possible sources of this delay. One is network latency. I get a ping of 20 ms to classictw.com. The other is an IO processing lag of 10 ms in TW itself. I noticed that this was showing up in my profiling when I was using a 100 ms lag for processing the input/output buffers, so I decreased this to 10 ms and improved the situation significantly. But it's very possible that we're seeing a combination of these factors.

I'm going to duplicate your tests here and see if I can see any additional delays being imposed, and if not, where that extra 25 ms per sector is going.