The only thing that po's me ....

[pathfinder]

is sometimes the AI can take up to 10 minutes a turn....

yeah, I know that is the way it is in turn-based but ahm impatient!

back to the pits now, rant off...
maybe I'll be able to kick that crystal's hiney

[Courageous]

This sounds distinctly like you don't have
enough memory. I have a 500 mhz K7 with
256 megs of ram. Turns go in 30 seconds or
so with 14 or so AI players and a fully
populated late-game universe with many ships
and units.

C//

[pathfinder]

128 MB here, pc-100...
and an Athalon 500 mhz..

and it was a bit populated....I had only 10-15 ships of various sizes but almost 100 planets...
had just engaged the AI in an intel "war"...

[This message has been edited by pathfinder (edited 16 December 2000).]

[Lupusman]

Me too, my machine is slow as crap. Especially when playing with max AI's and 200+ systems. What you have to do is find a good book between turns.

[eagleton]

I think it's not mainly memory. I have only 64 megs of RAM, but a 710 Celeron processor, and it's mostly pretty fast when the AI has its turn. I can hardly hear my harddrive working then, so the processor seems to be "the thing".

[Lerchey]

It's almost definitely a memory problem. I play on a 180mhz dell with 128 MB of RAM. Turns with 14 players and a LOT of ships take about 1 1/2 minutes. Since the machine is a piece of ****, that doesn't bother me. My office machine has both a faster processor and more ram (256MB) and turns there run in under 30 seconds with the same galaxy (I play the same game on both machines).

One of my earlier playtest machines was a 180 with 64 MB of ram. That was really slow. Memory does make a difference.


John

[Courageous]

I find it bizarre how people with nearly
the same configurations could get such
dramatically different results. More info:
My "max number of systems" is left to the
default in Settings.txt (i.e., it's 100).
I set the Max Units in Space to 200, but
leave the Max Ships at 100. I play in a
Large universe. I set the maximum number of
AIs and play with Neutrals. I've seen late
game splinter empires form, so I've had as
many as 19-20 AI players taking a turn. It's
always less than a minute or so.

My configuration is a 500 mhz K7 with 256
megs of ram; I have a Matrox G400, and I'm
running Direct X/8. My hard drive is SCSI:
a 10000 RPM Seagate Cheetah.

I've been happy with the amount of time the
AI takes. On a technical note: has anyone
tried parallel turns with the A.I.? In
theory, the AI could do all of its processing
in seperate threads during YOUR turn. Does
it do this?

C//

[DirectorTsaarx]

I have a 233MHz PII, 64M RAM, and Windows95, and I've never had a problem with long turns. I don't remember the max ships/max units settings, but I set them both pretty high. I've also been doing the large universe/large number of AI opponents, neutrals allowed, etc. Maybe those people experiencing long turns have lots of stuff running in the background? I've put some effort into turning off all the garbage the SW vendors leave running.

[llreye]

Another issue is saving/autosaving since history files (for empires comparison) can be as bad as tribbles.
-MKC