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Thanks for the write-up. Always cool to see how different people solve these kind of problems.

I don't know much about cocos2d but since the dots are purely visual, do they need to be game objects? Couldn't you keep their transform in a separate data structure which you can update independently and pass to a shader (or similar) for rendering? I'm thinking something similar to how particles in VFX are usually done.

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Thanks for the comment. It is indeed something I've been considering. In fact, lots of the optimization done here is to move the logic away from the game objects , which should enable the flow you've described.

I ended up not doing it in this iteration because:

- cocos2d's custom shader support is kind of poor, especially documentation is pretty much zero

- the dot is not "purely" visual. For example you can trace and highlight a resource's movement. This is not a blocker per se, but requires more work