AI Combat speedup test for the Balance Mod 1.03

[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.

[Suicide Junkie]

The main issue would be the reduction in granularity of the combat. For stock weapons, which have quite slow reload times, not much of an issue.

The 330ms DUCs in GGmod would have issues with retargetting under the same scaling system.

[Raapys]

Possibly. Not sure what the interval between rechecking for targets is. That would actually be interesting to find out. It would still be possible to use a lower multiplier, though.