LONG AI Turn

[azpops]

I am playing a game with the AI set to Hard. The AI turn has been getting progressively longer as time goes on. I have reached turn 322 and the game has become unplayable due to the length of the AI turn. I have timed the last two turns and the AI has taken 10 minutes to think, then another 3 minutes to move the AI faction pieces. Sorry, but 13 minutes between turns really turns me off. This seems to be a consistent problem with the game that you really need to address before releasing it. I tried to include a zip file of the game, but it says it is too big at 270 kB.

[akmelius]

I had the same problem.

[Earthmichael]

I have never had a game go so long, but I too noticed a large increase in the AI turn time after the last major update.

I also have run into the upload limit myself. It is absurdly low at 25 Kb. It should be at least 1 MB.

[JAlfredGoodwin]

I spike on all 8 cores, then it settles down to just one or 2 cores at a time. Im wondering if the AI is doing a chess-style best move analysis with recursion, and the multi-threading is hanging up waiting on one or two threads to complete before continuing on.

[azpops]

I have never had a game go so long, but I too noticed a large increase in the AI turn time after the last major update.

I like to play the huge map, but even then, I can usually end a game pretty quickly if I try. I have been trying the AI at a harder level and purposely dragging the game out to see what effects are encountered. One of the major ones is the lengthy AI turn. At a harder AI and giving the factions time to research, they tend to build better units than with the AI set at medium. I haven't tried the hardest setting yet, that is my next goal, if we can get the AI turn length shortened. Right now I hate having to wait 12 to 15 minutes for the AI to move.

[Wildfire]

I tried a "very hard" game w/ the largest map setting. Even on beginning AI turns were 20 - 45 seconds. I'll retry a few fresh games on different difficulty settings and see if it's an AI thing or a map size thing.

[Earthmichael]

Does the AI take advantage of multicore processors to reduce turn time? I have an i7, so that might be an advantage here.

Still, I noticed a very definite increase of time at the last major release. Did something happen at the last major release to slow down the AI processing time?

[void]

Hey guys, our publisher is looking into a solution for the file size limit. For now, please just email bigger saves to pandora@proxy-studios.com. You don't have to compress the files, since Pandora's saves are already compressed.

Also, turn processing durations of such length are of course unacceptable and will be fixed before release. 20 - 45 seconds at the start of the game sounds like something is heavily broken, and yes, AI computation is multi-threaded on player granularity. The next build will cut down the processing duration significantly. We are searching for optimal paths too freely at the moment, which gives a higher fidelity but is most likely too much for huge worlds with thousands of units in the later stages of the game.