For sure I can at least consider it. I haven't looked at the defensive AI much so far. I have looked over the offensive AI, and am thinking of ways to tweak it to improve its behavior, but I haven't gotten around to even trying that yet. I'll keep the defensive AI in mind too.
Reducing turn times would be challenging. First I'd have to figure out why turns take so long to begin with. I've heard it blamed on the trade network calculations but based on what I've seen they only take up ~20% of the late game turn time. I suspect the biggest factor is the unit AI based on what I've read of the decompiled code. There are a lot of "N^2" loops in the unit AI, in other words, cases where the unit AI processes each unit in the game. This is N^2 since the game has to process AI for each unit to begin with, then each unit processes again each one, so the amount of processing is proportional to the square of the number of units on the map. For example, when a unit searches for a transport to load into, it checks every unit on the map. Same when it searches for an army to join. It would be tough but possible to optimize that by modifying the code to instead identify candidate transports and armies once for all units instead of repeatedly for each unit. Though I'm not even sure that that's causing the slowdown, I'd have to inspect the program as it runs to verify.
Regarding the no tresspassing its a huge addon to the game, but for ccm for example there are hidden nationality units andcan we let them tresspass , the invisible units too, in the next version if possible.
This does seem to cause the AI to send out its bombard-units in a 1:1 ratio with the escort-defenders, though, and hence (because it then decides it must replace the town's "lost" defender) put too many shields into defenders, relative to attackers.
You (or any of us) could also test it in practice: build a very computationally complex scenario, and time the same turns while removing various things: air and sea trade, roads, unit strategies, units themselves by type, cropped empty tiles, and so on. That's not going to pinpoint specific code obviously, but may help narrow down what to profile.
Sure, that's an easy change to make. It makes sense that invisible units should ignore border restrictions, I'm not so sure about hidden nationality units but I'll make it totally configurable. By the way, if you've been playing with trespassing prevention turned on, has it been working OK? I still consider that feature semi-experimental since I never got around to comprehensively testing it. In particular I'm concerned the AI might not cope with it in all circumstances.
Thanks, you too.
Unfortunately these changes would be difficult. For example, units can have multiple escorters but only one escortee, so it's difficult to have anything above a 1/1 ratio of artillery to defenders escorting them. I could try something funky like assigning one artillery as the escort of another, but I doubt that would work out well. The AI doesn't have any concept of a unit stack that I've seen. As far as I can tell, it forms artillery stacks only because all artillery+escort pairs independently decide to do the same thing. So altering its "stack" composition is tough. One idea I have is to encourage offensive units to stay near the artillery. That doesn't solve the problem but it would make it less likely that artillery is bombarding uselessly while the attackers are somewhere else. Though I'm not sure if even that's practical.
Seems to me,that forcing Invisible and/or HN units to respect foreign borders pretty much defeats the purpose of both those flags, though!
I have experienced something interesting with the disallow tressspassing enabled on ccm, Units including HN units(enslaver, lawers) can attack the rival units that are on the edge of their territories and the declare war popup shows or for the HN units they can enslave them without entering the borders, at least i can enslave some workers hehe.
Sounds good.
I haven't played many mods, even the ones that come with the game, so I don't have a good idea of what the purpose of the HN ability actually is. When I think of HN, I think of privateers, which are almost completely pointless units. Preventing them from trespassing shouldn't hurt them much since they still have all the open ocean to operate on. However if mods use HN units in a way that it makes sense for them to be able to trespass then I'll make that the rule and won't bother with another config option. I'll turn the question around, and this is for anyone who wants to chime in, is there any reason not to do this? Is there any reason HN units should not be allowed to trespass?
That's consistent with my thinking that the unit AI is responsible for much of the slowdown. I can't say if it's fixable though until I've looked into it.
Then I misunderstood your post: I thought you were asking for HN/Invisible units to be blocked. My apologies.
Simply put, HN units can attack an opponent's units without that opponent declaring war in response.
It's true that Privateers are weaker on defence than Frigates, but victorious Privateers can enslave new Privateers, so someone who reaches Magnetism early enough, and starts building a steady supply of Privateers, can potentially clear opponents' ships off the map pretty quickly.
One possible answer to that is that the AI can use HN land-units to attack and possibly even capture an opponent's town while at peace. This may actually be a bug, since the human player is disallowed from doing it.
I did a short test in Debug mode about rebasing a preplaced Polaris tactical missile with the rebase flag in the mod CCM 2.50 to a preplaced "nuclear" sub, in this case to a SSNB of the George Washington class in that mod. What was no problem for the human player (as I have tested this many years ago), did not work for the AI. The AI did not rebase the tactical nuke to the submarine in the thousand years of the game this test was running (4000 BC to 3000 BC).
So Predator145, I think you are right by mentioning, that the tactical nuke here has a big problem for the AI in its settings.
As a consequence I will set all tactical nukes to be upgraded to ICBMs so no unused tactical nukes with a range of only a few tiles will stay in their inland cities for the complete game and additionally I consider to give them the airlift flag, so they can be moved by the AI at least to coastal towns that are containing airports and from here can be loaded into "nuclear" subs who are located in the same coastal town (or one tile beneath that town if the immobile flag is skipped).
