This thought popped up when I realised I spend more time waiting for the computer to play then playing myself and I hate to see my computer having fun without me...
Even on a 3.7 Ghz bi-processor computer with a gig of ram,
the time you have to wait between turns becomes unacceptable when playing on huge maps with a lot of civs... and you can't take profit of that time to go to the toilet, grab a coke or check if it's day or night outside because you would miss the movement of those 20 Mongol swordsman hitchhiking towards your capital city. One solution to this is to take out the maximum of AI controlled civs to reduce the load on the computer.. which obliges you to be quiet an agressiv civ.
I suppose that after so many years of existance, civilization uses the most optimised code lines to control AI civs, so we can't ask them to simplify this in Civ4, on the contrary:
please make AI even more complexe and powerfull.. but there is another solution to this problem which is quiet simple actualy:
there is a long amount of time during which almost no processor ressources are utilized which is while the player is making his moves with his slow human brain.
Why not use that time to calculate the moves of the civs that are not directly concerned by the players choices ? A lot of stuff on which the players decision don't have an impact could be processed (like AI city productions, troop moves, workers actions, cultural influence changes, inter-AI battle resolution etc...) And if a players action does oblige the AI to react (like declaring war to that civ), well then, the pre-processed stuff are just thrown away and new decisions are made by the AI (like start producing troops in all cities).
Two other improvements that could be done to reduce the 'waiting' aspects of this game would be to continue processing stuff when a dialog box pops up waiting for the players click instead of pausing everything while he reads the stuff.
And secondly, allow the player to do stuff while AI is playing (with a little pop up window showing AI visible moves). You could, for example, allow the user to scan through his cities while AI is playing and do minor actions (changes that wouldn't influence the way AI is playing) like modify city production or reallocate the workers.
Even on a 3.7 Ghz bi-processor computer with a gig of ram,
the time you have to wait between turns becomes unacceptable when playing on huge maps with a lot of civs... and you can't take profit of that time to go to the toilet, grab a coke or check if it's day or night outside because you would miss the movement of those 20 Mongol swordsman hitchhiking towards your capital city. One solution to this is to take out the maximum of AI controlled civs to reduce the load on the computer.. which obliges you to be quiet an agressiv civ.
I suppose that after so many years of existance, civilization uses the most optimised code lines to control AI civs, so we can't ask them to simplify this in Civ4, on the contrary:
please make AI even more complexe and powerfull.. but there is another solution to this problem which is quiet simple actualy:
there is a long amount of time during which almost no processor ressources are utilized which is while the player is making his moves with his slow human brain.
Why not use that time to calculate the moves of the civs that are not directly concerned by the players choices ? A lot of stuff on which the players decision don't have an impact could be processed (like AI city productions, troop moves, workers actions, cultural influence changes, inter-AI battle resolution etc...) And if a players action does oblige the AI to react (like declaring war to that civ), well then, the pre-processed stuff are just thrown away and new decisions are made by the AI (like start producing troops in all cities).
Two other improvements that could be done to reduce the 'waiting' aspects of this game would be to continue processing stuff when a dialog box pops up waiting for the players click instead of pausing everything while he reads the stuff.
And secondly, allow the player to do stuff while AI is playing (with a little pop up window showing AI visible moves). You could, for example, allow the user to scan through his cities while AI is playing and do minor actions (changes that wouldn't influence the way AI is playing) like modify city production or reallocate the workers.
