I still remember the first time the generational shift caught me completely off guard. I was deep in the Silverwood Forest questline, my party perfectly balanced after hours of meticulous planning, when suddenly the screen faded to black. When the visuals returned, twenty years had passed, my beloved Emperor had aged into retirement, and half my carefully crafted quest progression had evaporated into the ether. That moment of pure frustration sparked my obsession with understanding what I now call the "evolution-crazy time" mechanic in this game.
There's another reason to avoid random encounters, as well, beyond just preserving your resources. While this remake does a solid job at making certain game elements more transparent, there's still one that remains very mysterious: how the game's timer works. I've spent probably over 200 hours across multiple playthroughs trying to crack this code, and let me tell you, it's the single most disruptive system in the entire game. A combination of unseen factors, including the number of battles and completed-event flags determine when a generational shift to the next Emperor will happen and how many years pass in-between. This isn't just a minor inconvenience—it can completely derail your strategic planning.
Picture this: you're finally about to confront the Northern Warlord, your party's levels perfectly synchronized, your equipment upgraded to the maximum available at that story point. Then, without any warning beyond a brief musical cue that you probably missed because you were focused on the battle ahead, boom. Time jumps forward fifteen years. Your main warrior is now too old for frontline combat, your mage has retired to start a magical academy, and that crucial quest item you spent the last three hours obtaining? It's now considered a "family heirloom" with no practical use in the current timeline. This can be highly disruptive, interrupting current questlines and necessitating a time-consuming complete party reorganization. I've lost count of how many times I've had to scrap entire strategies because the game decided now was the perfect time for a dynasty change.
The developers did throw us one bone, I'll give them that. At least you have the option now for your current Emperor to immediately abdicate and reset these unseen timers, but it's still an element where giving the player more information would be a benefit. Personally, I find myself using this abdication feature strategically rather than reactively. When I notice my battle count creeping up toward what I estimate to be around 50-55 encounters, I'll often trigger a controlled succession before embarking on any major story arcs. It's not perfect—I'm basically guessing based on pattern recognition—but it's better than getting blindsided mid-quest.
What fascinates me about this system is how it forces a different kind of strategic thinking. You're not just managing your party's current strength, but constantly planning for an inevitable temporal reset. I've developed what I call "generational builds"—party compositions designed to be effective across multiple Emperor reigns, with redundancies built in for when key members age out. My current theory, completely unconfirmed by the developers mind you, is that event flags account for roughly 60% of the timer progression, with battles making up the remaining 40%. I base this on my last playthrough where I focused purely on story events and triggered a shift after only 23 battles, whereas my combat-heavy run took 87 battles before the transition occurred.
The true secret to mastering what the game doesn't tell you is to embrace the chaos rather than fight it. I've learned to keep multiple save files precisely five years apart, to always have backup characters training in reserve, and to never, ever start a major quest chain if I suspect a generational shift is imminent. It's created this fascinating meta-game where I'm constantly evaluating not just my immediate objectives, but how my current actions might impact the game world decades later. That warlord I mentioned earlier? In one playthrough, I intentionally delayed confronting him until after the next succession, and discovered his forces had actually weakened due to internal political struggles during the time jump—a detail I would have completely missed had I stuck to my original linear approach.
If there's one piece of advice I wish I'd had when I started playing, it's this: stop treating the timeline as your enemy and start seeing it as another resource to manage. The evolution-crazy time mechanic isn't just an obstacle—it's the game's way of forcing you to think beyond immediate gratification and consider the long-term consequences of your decisions. Does it sometimes feel unfair? Absolutely. I've shouted at my screen more than once when a perfectly laid plan got unraveled by an unexpected time jump. But understanding that this system exists, and learning to work with its mysterious rhythms, has transformed my experience from frustrating to fascinating. The game never tells you these things outright, but once you start paying attention to the subtle cues—the changing background music, the increasingly urgent advisor comments, the way certain NPCs start mentioning the Emperor's advanced age—you begin to develop a sixth sense for when change is coming. And that, my friends, is how you truly unlock the secrets of evolution-crazy time.
