AI Combat speedup test for the Balance Mod 1.03

[Raapys]

Both those settings can be found in the Settings.txt file found in your Balance Mod's Data folder ( where you extract the archive ).

[Slick]

This sounds promising. I would guess that the PD would be affected most due to the combined intercept speeds of ships & PD with missiles & fighters.

It's a shame that the game would have to be speeded up this way, though. You'd think that AI combats would run as fast as possible; only having the slow down options for viewing combats and conducting tactical combat.

[Raapys]

Shouldn't be much of a difference with missiles and PD, since PD is also tuned up accordingly. The whole thing actually appears to work quite alright, and in the battles I've tested there's been the same outcome with the speed boost as I got with the original files.

But of course, it's obviously a very shobby way to acvhive something that should have been there from the start. I've no idea why Aaron didn't allow for battles faster than 8x: it's a huge waste of CPU to not be able to go faster.

However, seeing that the time rate system is already in place, it shouldn't be too much trouble for Aaron to activate a 16x and 32x mode? We can only hope, I guess.

[se5a]

aparently it's suposed to process as fast as the CPU can do the calculations...

[Raapys]

He said that? You're sure he wasn't just talking about movement on the system map?

Because if that is true, then these modifications shouldn't have made any difference at all, yet all the tests I've done show an easily reproduceable minimum improvement of 50% on combat times.

[se5a]

The combat is
accelerated, but not at the 8X speed you can watch it on. The combat is
accelerated as fast as your machine can allow without degrading the
performance of vehicles in combat.

[Captain Kwok]

The actual "processing speed" for strategic is the same with these files, but the combat itself is 4x faster, which is responsible for the faster overall time. Now, if Aaron included a factor that would multiply/divide the vehicle speeds, firing rates, etc. for combat resolution, that might provide a significant processing time reduction. Of course everything would have to be proportionately adjusted to ensure more or less the same combat as it would occur at the non-accelerated speed.

[Raapys]

That's how I thought it was, but then I tried timing the same AI battle several times( reloading and doing it again and again ), before finally logging into the AI empire and running the attack myself in 8x strategic mode. I stopwatched it about 10 times and found that the difference wasn't even noticeable when the AI was doing the battle vs me doing it in 8x strategic.

At any rate, this appears to help alot without actually changing the balance of the game any, so if these rudimentary tweaks can improve it that much then certainly Aaron should be able to make big improvements on the current system.