I have no idea about this, but is the GUI something that slows down the game? I was thinking and wondering if having a pure command-line interface to continue a specific save would be feasible, and if there would be any gains in speed of the simulation for doing so - the reason being that it might be interesting to use that when leaving the game entirely AFK for long periods of time, which I believe most of us do anyhow. Turning off the GUI of the game entirely and letting it just run in the background somehow for faster performance - at the fastest speed the processor is able to handle, not limited to x10?

Rendering the graphics is pretty inconsequential in terms of performance -- especially as fast forward speed gets higher, running the actual code for all the entities in the game takes more and more of the resources while rendering stays pretty flat. It *does* technically take more resources to render the whole map zoomed out than it does to render a smaller window so if you want to get basically as close as you can to what you're suggesting, just zoom all the way in so you can see just a tiny portion of the map -- it might get you stable framerates on, for example, 5x instead of 4x, but won't be a total game-changing difference.