AI concept of the '80ies ... why?

[Arralen]

There's a fundamental flaw in all of todays strategy games, including Dominions (3) :

The games getting more and more complicated - several orders of magnitude, actually, if you want to put down the mechanics into formulas for an AI to use.
And we all want "smart" AIs, don't we? AIs which at least somewhat understand whats going on and can play the game on roughly even ground without cheating too much (able to see through for of war etc)

But does it get the 'power' to do so? Hardly.
Yes, o.c., CPU 'power' has grown enormously.
But power = work * time, or something like that, I was told.
And obviously, there's lots more time needed to reach to 'power levels' we want to see, resulting in long waits between turns.
Have seen those complaints about Dom3, SE5 and the Civ series lately

But there's an easy solution to this:
Atm, the AI programming is still following the concepts of the '80 .. but instead of giving the AI only some seconds to "think" between the player hitting the "end turn" button and him eagerly awaiting the results of his orders, the AI(s) should do its(their) turn(s) while the player does his.

That shouldn't be too hard to implement, with all those games being TCP/IP-enabled MP games .. just plug the AI(s) in like any other player in a MP game, and you wouldn't even need big changes to the game mechanics to make it work.

And with all those multi-thread, multi-core and multi-CPU equipped PCs out there, I doubt anyone could complain about the AI slowing down his PC or endless "end turn" waits ... .