Long delay at AI's turn

RedArmy · November 12, 2001, 22:34

I have problem with long delay at AI's turn.

The question I have here is, AI is not taking time to think strategy, but using almost all the time to move their units, one by one, and one square by one square. In other words, the more units AI has, the more time costs in its turn. Why AI does this?

Will AI just lift the unit from current square and put it in the target square, at least in the areas where human player can not see? Or even relocate them all together, so as to reduce the AI turn by 99% of time?

I don't think AI enjoys looking the animation of unit movement. The problem maybe because there will be battle encountment in the middle of the route of unit movement, or terrian restrictions etc. etc. so an unit can not be 'airlifted' to anywhere by default. But I don't think a good programmer has to actually square by square move the unit to find out the confliction in the middle of the route, rather than calculate beforehand and airdrop the unit in the place it should stop.

Anyway, that's my thought, and I really can't afford to spend most of my time just sitting before the screen and wait for AI.

BTW, my machine is:

AMD Athlon 1.4G
512 MB DDR RAM
GeForce 2 GTS with 64 DDR RAM
Raid 0/UDMA 100 hard disks

kimmygibler · November 12, 2001, 22:51

I agree.
I went to war against the Japanese because they had over ten galleons circling around one of my cities. It was insane, the cpu had to show each one move every turn. That is as good a reason as any to go to war in civ3. As soon as I declared war, they came and started bombarding one of my road tiles. The bombard turns took even longer as they had to sail up to the coast, bombard, and then go back a few squares. It didn't even make sense why they were still using galleons because this was the modern era. The Japanese had battleships and destryoers, but for some reason they kept about a dozen galleons. Don't units go obsolete? I mean those things are useless. They couldn't even bombard my road successfully. (although they still took out a couple battleships)

btw use subs to sink galleons and other obsolete units.

The problem would be solved if they implemented your suggestion of warping units to their final destination instead of going piece by piece, moev by move.

Also, if ai respected your borders more. It's good that ai will go through if they have to, or if you are weaker, but mostly they just aimlessly wander around within your borders for no reason. Especially at sea! Please get rid of the ai's aimless wandering!!!

Also, if the ai didn't build cities right up against your border this would help a lot. You can always see one tile further than your border, so end up having to watch not only your dozens of workers wandering around (this is acceptable I guess) but the ai workers as well. I'd be happier if the extra tile of vision was eliminated just so I wouldn't have to watch ai units run around.

This is the biggest problem with the game in the modern age. Especially if you are trying to wage war. The time in between turns is consistently over 30 seconds on normal map. If you are involved in a war that can getup to over 45 seconds easily.

btw I have 700Mhz cpu and this is obviously with all animations turned off. I assume turning off animation is about the first thing everyone does when they get the game...

kimmygibler · November 12, 2001, 22:53

I forgot the good news is that I think Soren said they are looking at this problem for the patch...

RedArmy · November 12, 2001, 22:59

Thanks kimmygibler!

And it's great to know Soren is looking into this issue. BTW, the transcript of chat with Soren is too long --- 6 pages for Christ sake, I didn't finish reading even second page.

kimmygibler · November 12, 2001, 23:03

I'm pretty sure it's in there somewhere. He said it was one of the things they were looking at. Although I think he said that in relation to every minute, idiosyncratic issue that anyone brought up. So mabye he was just trying to appease people and sound they are trying hard, but I think they must realize that this is a huge problem with the game in the modern age.

LaRusso · November 13, 2001, 03:55

awww
hold down shift while AI moves....it will blitz

duxup · November 13, 2001, 04:17

I don't mind the long turns late in the game for me. The problem with it I have is that I have to watch every minute of it because you never know when you'll see the visible AI moves.

You'll sit there staring at nothing and then BAM, a destroyer shells your city and disappears out of view. Had you not watched the whole darned turn, you'd never know what happened to that rail road that was over your only oil resource.