Strategic Pause

This article may be out of date. It was last updated for 1.1.5.

A Strat Paused menu screen

Strategic Pausing (abr. Strat Pause) was a feature added in version 1.0.28 which freezes the economic and strategic parts of the game under certain circumstances.

Motivation & Effects

Strategic Pausing was introduced to prevent AI Factions from taking over the map while the player is AFK (in singleplayer) or when players are offline (in multiplayer). It also intended to allow youtubers/streamers/modders alt-tab out of the game to do other work (such as editing) without the map being overrun.

Strategic Pausing disables:

• Economic Simulation (income, population changes, safety increase, etc)
• AI Faction actions (launching base attacks, purchasing or racketeering property, etc)
• onHour effects (aggression/reputation decay)

Strategic Pausing does not disable tactical AI (CDF cars, bandits, etc).

Activating Strategic Pause

Strategic Pause will be engaged if you press Esc to open the Game Menu (see screenshot at the top of the article). If you are in a multiplayer server and all connected players are in that menu then Strat Pause will engage. The server will also enter strat pause if there are no players connected.

If you are in the Game Menu you must wait 1 minute for Stat Pause to engage. This is to prevent an exploit where you can hit Esc when the hour changes to prevent onHour functions.

External Links

IndieDb: Dev Diary 15

Steam Announcement for Patch 1.0.28