On the cusp...

[Lasu]

curtadams said:
An interesting idea for SP would be to have the computer pre-compute the turns with background threads. First plan the AI turns. Then, once that's done, calculate all the battles as the player sets them up. Because the turn calc time is small compared to the playing time it should be pretty easy to stuff most of the work into the background from a time viewpoint (the programming, admittedly, isn't so easy).

Now there's an excellent idea (though it indeed might be a bit hard to program). As for the PbEM issues, perhaps it could be done the old way in PbEM games (since the turns last so long anyway)? Of course, if the majority of people play PbEM, it might not be worthwhile to spend too much time on this matter (though I doubt that is the case )

[thejeff]

Not so much that the majority of games are multiplayer, but that the majority of the developer's interest is.

This would require a very different model for turn processing and probably use up a lot of memory, since so many things would have to be done conditionally.

About the only thing that could be done ahead of time is planning the AI orders. Once mages start casting spells, pretty much anything may change based on the results of ritual attack spells, new globals etc. Everything preprocessed would have to be held in memory waiting it's turn to actually happen. I doubt you'd get much time savings in any moderately complicated game, which is where you'd want it.
Nor would it be a simple programming task.