Tiryan

well... having a "nice computer" and knowing how it actually functions are two different things to elaborate further on the previous post... reaching the decisions is probably not what takes up all the time but rather carrying out the animations (i.e. having civilians/local forces/aliens running around/turning/shooting; perhaps you noticed how the game switches heights when running animations for NPCs on another height level) so it's not a matter of the processing speed of your specific CPU but simply (enemy/neutral-forces X animations-duration) which is the same for every PC there are several ways of reducing that time... like minimizing the off-screen (=hidden) movement and/or only setting the end result of an alien turn rather than running all the animations since the player does not see them anyway either way a game should never block the user... disabling the game menu is almost as bad as unskippable in-game cutscenes (I'd love to play the dawn of war 2 campaigns again but that game insists on showing you the exact same boring stuff over and over and over again kinda sucks)