Turn Calc Time

See Monster AI

for a discussion of 9000 SECOND AI turns. I hope that I can suggest some easy changes to the engine based on my optimization and previous AI experience. If so then the changes should be in the next patch or two. In the meantime just focus on crushing any AI that gets big and let the small fry alone. Basically that is what you do anyway, isn't it ? I think when the hardcode was written he just assumed that no AI empire would EVER get that big, an unfair assumption that says the AI can NEVER WIN. I really hated the cheating in MOO2 by the AI, but at least on impossible setting the AI would whip my butt sometimes, especially the Saccra....

[capnq]

quote:

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I think when the hardcode was written he just assumed that no AI empire would EVER get that big

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I think the more likely assumption is that he thought no one in their right mind would mod the quadrant size limit above 100 systems. I've yet to finish a game in a "normal" large quad, and have trouble imagining that I'd want to bump that up to the 255 hard limit. Reading your reports of your Huge Game experiments almost frightens me sometimes.

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[Hota]

I'd love to try a 255 game with as many AIs as I can fit! Too bad my system can barely handle a medium game. Can anybody guess what the min specs would be for a huge (255) game with more than 15 AIs be? I'm guessing it would be somewhere close to top of the line (1.4Gz Athlon & 256 Mb RAM)

-Hota

[Hota]

I just get frustrated having it take 4-5 min to process the turn. Your right though, when there's something decent on the tube it's ok, but when there's commercials on every other channel I just find myself staring at the screen wishing it would hurry up.

-hota

[Saxon]

One thing I found was that when I run SE4 without the CD in the drive, the ships moved very slowly on the screen. Now I just leave the CD and play music on the stereo, but it was weird.

quote:

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Originally posted by Hota:
I'd love to try a 255 game with as many AIs as I can fit! Too bad my system can barely handle a medium game. Can anybody guess what the min specs would be for a huge (255) game with more than 15 AIs be? I'm guessing it would be somewhere close to top of the line (1.4Gz Athlon & 256 Mb RAM)

-Hota

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Not at ALL, because Aaron is VERY miserly with his use of memory. See the turn 60 post in the archive from the game I was playing against 19 AI with no mods just 50 sphere worlds added using the map editor. I have an old 1998 machine with only 64 meg of memory and there was no problem at all except it took about ten minutes for the 19 AI to do their turn. What the heck is your machine that it has problems ? The speed has gone up by over a factor of 8 and the memory provided on a standard machine has gone up by a factor of 32 in the Last ten years! My suggestions to Aaron will require about a megabyte of memory, but there should be 8 times that of free memory on a 16 meg machine, which I had thought would be the smallest ANYBODY would be using in 2001......

quote:

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Originally posted by capnq:

I think when the hardcode was written he just assumed that no AI empire would EVER get that big

---

I think the more likely assumption is that he thought no one in their right mind would mod the quadrant size limit above 100 systems. I've yet to finish a game in a "normal" large quad, and have trouble imagining that I'd want to bump that up to the 255 hard limit. Reading your reports of your Huge Game experiments almost frightens me sometimes.

Before I started saving my empire I had played a half dozen games in 255 quadrants with over 500 colonies planted by hand in each. I then colonized over 900 planets by hand in each of two 255 quadrant games to get my racial score up. This second test game of the AI planting about 1000 colonies has pumped the Clays race score above 600,000 points. I guess it depends on how much time you are prepared to put into a single game. An unmodded 255 quadrant fully colonized by hand ending about turn 150 takes me 100-150 hours depending on how much difficulty the AI causes me after I blitz at turn 120....