SEV: Taking me to the edge of sanity

[Baal]

Turn processing taking 10+ minutes at turn 60 I can stand (barely).
Slight bugs being fixed continually, not a problem.
When the game crashes so much that I can't do more than 2 turns in a row. That puts me to the end of my rope.

[Ungomma]

Yes-yes... It takes longer to process the turn than for me to make it. That is very very wrong.

I doubt there's any justification for such immense slowness. The code has to be fixed.

[Ragnarok-X]

Agreed. The code is probably majorly broken. At some point i had games with 4-6 AIs where already turns 5+ were taking 10 seconds and even more. And thats with using 2 gigs of RAM and a E6600. Im dissapointed by that.

[Raapys]

A patch ago it was problems with combat that made the turn processing take way too long. That's been pretty much resolved( although one could argue AI combats should still be optimized alot, speed-wise ). The problem now seem to be that the actual 'movement' phase of the AIs seem to take much longer than it did before.

From what I remember, the best turn processing speed was at patch 1.08, i.e. release state, and even that speed wasn't impressive with alot of AIs. I'd be playing the game alot more if it wasn't for the fun-degrading processing times, that's for sure.

[Romulus68]

Keep in mind how long it takes you to do a turn then multiply that by 11 for the AI's.

The logic routines are going to take time as the Empires grow and the number of ships increase.

Personally, I think the AI needs better fleet management as it seems to move each ship indivdually. This appears to be the slow down in my games.

[Fyron]

Bah, you think that is bad... you should have seen how horribly slow turn processing was with civ3 when it came out.

Aaron is aware of the slow nature of the AI script processing, and mentioned that he had some ideas for how to speed it up in the IRC chat.

[Captain Kwok]

The slowness is primarily pathfinding for ships and not script execution.

[Arralen]

Fundamental flaw in all those games (as Fyron remarked, it was the same with Civ3, isn't that much better with Civ4 at times, and Dominions3 can be problematic as well with 'big' games):

The games getting more and more complicated - several orders of magnitude, actually, if you want to put down the mechanics into formulas for an AI to use.
And we all want "smart" AIs, don't we? AIs which at least somewhat understand whats going on and can play the game on roughly even ground without cheating too much (able to see through for of war etc)

But does it get the 'power' to do so? Hardly.
Yes, o.c., CPU 'power' has grown enormously.
But power = work * time, or something like that, I was told.
And obviously, there's lots more time needed to reach to 'power levels' we want to see.

But there's an easy solution to this:
Atm, the AI programming is still following the concepts of the '80 .. but instead of giving the AI only some seconds to "think" between the player hitting the "end turn" button and him eagerly awaiting the results of his orders, the AI(s) should do its(their) turn(s) while the player does his.

That shouldn't be too hard to implement, with all those games being TCP/IP-enabled MP games .. just plug the AI(s) in like any other player in a MP game, and you wouldn't even need big changes to the game mechanics to make it work.

And with all those multi-thread, multi-core and multi-CPU equipped PCs out there, I doubt anyone could complain about the AI slowing down his PC or endless "end turn" waits ... .

[Atrocities]

I thought Aaron also said that the slow down was related to ship movement or tracking or something in addition to AI script processing??? I don't recall to be honest.

EDIT:

Wait, I see that CK posted about the ship path thingy so that comment from Aaron must be accurate.

[Captain Kwok]

Seriously, it's a combination of pathfinding and sometimes combats. The heaviest script execution times are on turn 1, 10, 20, etc. when the AI updates its designs... but those are just little bumps. You'll notice pathfinding kick in around turn 4-5, when the AI first starts exploring/surveying.