Question for the Developers?

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally posted by Arryn:

BTW, pointing out that the EU engine is realtime is meaningless as the AI can take as long as it wants per country. I play on a 2.1GHz system, but I have also played their games on a 350MHz (which is just above their minimum spec, FYI) and the game just slows down. It doesn't play "dumber" because it has insufficient time to do the same amount of calculations. Hence the flaw in your argument.

What flaw in my argument? I just point out that if you can allocate 30s pure processor time on a fast computer, and correspondingly more on a slow computer, because timing is not important, to calculate a turn result while only displaying a minimal popup and accepting minimal user interaction, you have substantially more CPU cycles to make decisions, simulate battles, &etc, than a game that needs to time-slice such decisions in real-time for a large number of factions while, at the same time, running the graphics engine and the GUI, which keeps a fairly steady flow on most machines.

That is not fundamentally a question of machine speed, it is a question of CPU allocation - and one of the reasons that comparisons between real-time and turn-based are often wont to fail.

[ February 18, 2004, 00:28: Message edited by: Peter Ebbesen ]