Something strange happens when the window is minimized. When you expand the window, there is a brief freeze, followed by an instant acceleration of the alien ships.
#Something strange
regal bridge
half lynx
The game suspends the renderer thread when it's not in focus to save on CPU and GPU cycles. If you weren't away long enough for the game to go into offline calculation mode, you'll see that catchup as those threads resume and process a backlog.
regal bridge
this wasn't the case before the update on my hardware
half lynx
Interesting. I'll let the dev folks chime in, but this is behavior that I've noted for quite a while playing USI, so while it's not strange to me, it def could be something that was exposed because of an update.
For their sake, what platform are you playing on? Windows, Web, something else?