FYI, there was a bug that I introduced 3 months ago, which broke the capability to run the UTCI map without rooms. I just pushed a fix as you can see in this discussion:
So just make sure you run the LB Versioner if you want to try this and see how much faster your simulation is without the E+ part.
E+ does not have the ability to simulate curved geometry (everything must be planar). So, when you plug in a Rhino sphere for a shade, it gets converted to planar faces using Rhino’s default meshing before it goes off to E+. Planarizing the geometry in Rhino yourself will enable you to get much fewer faces and a much faster simulation compared to relying on Rhino’s default meshing. So this can be another way to get the E+ part of the simulation to run much faster.