it clocks decently high, and if two cores are all that matters I'm thinking of overclocking, because i have plenty of thermal headroom currently. my gpu is also underclocked currently, but I'll overclock the vram and see how that goes.  Do you think this will change in the future, or will it always be dependent on two cores?

I managed to update the version with fatpak though  

Thanks for the update, I added the 0ad repository in the Linux VM but the apt update failed:  

The AI logic was historically and it still is one of the bigger performance bottlenecks. This is related, in part, to the fact that most of the game's logic is still single-threaded. Pathfinder got its own thread in alpha 25. Sadly, this means that your "6 hyper-threaded cores" won't help you much. They might even be worse than a standard 2-core PCs of the past. This is because modern hardware design is focused on having many slower CPU cores, while older design retained fewer, but faster CPUs. So, your CPU clock speed is what matters the most, followed by the GPU memory (if you want high details on everything). 

I'm on windows 10, my cpu has 6 hyperthreaded cores, should I grab the latest build from the site, or maybe switch from vulken to opengl? I can take a screenshot of my task manager during a game if you'd like.

That's wrong. You might have been thinking about interpreted languages which use a Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), like CPython, which results in them not being able to utilize multiple CPU cores when using threads, but that's a limitation of such languages and doesn't apply to C++. And as a side note: Even in languages which use a GIL, multiple threads can be faster than multiple processes, depending on the kind of work to be parallelized. Check out for example the commit linked below, where I speed up validation of entities. I compared using multiple threads vs. multiple processes, but as more time is spent loading data from disk than doing actual CPU heavy computation, using multiple threads instead of using multiple processes was significantly faster, thanks to threads having a much lower overhead than processes. https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/commit/e755ef715565409b93cecdb2d84b5098a518fef6

"Nababu"  painting from the Renaissance . Author - unknown.    You can see that he was already bounded to a great destiny