In a turn based game that should not be that much of a problem, especially since you can do a lot of computation while the player does his turn.

For a unit which is afterwards hidden by a fog of war I'd suggest diffusing the power depending on the speed of the unit and with the fog of war borders as walls.

One of the things mentioned while speaking with a certain someone was this...

"I got into making games because I wanted to write AI.  I'm rooting for the computer, I want it to win... Other guys write AI because they have to.  So they kind of half-way write AI."

(mind you... these aren't the exact words spoken, but the general idea comes across.. )

Unfortunately that's wrong. Play Civ (any version) on large maps on an average requirements machine and you'll see that turns take a lot of time to compute.

I'm still hoping that Elemental will see "a certain someone" spread his interests to include AI that is 'on staff' for the player as well as running a strong civ all by itself. Maybe the vassals will be a good starting ground, and eventually we'll get royal councillors who can truly handle some delegated responsibility without too much risk of them abusing their authority.

Well, of course you can always use up any amount of computation time if you wish to. It depends on what algorithms you use and how much of a brute force approach. But compared to RTS, you have a lot of CPU cycles free for AI.

How about a setting in the game where we can say how much waiting we accept and the game would compute AI accordingly. I would not mind waiting 20 seconds extra every turn if the AI is slightly better.

A setting like this:

AI compute time acceptable

1. Very quick - shallow algorithms

2. Normal - standard AI

3. Slow - the AI is alllowed extended calculations

4. Marathon - AI Extreme - Allow a minute extra pr turn

What, are we running 286 processors? I am pretty sure the AI will be figuring out their moves and will be "waiting" on us meatheads to hit "end turn". I would be severely disappointed if 1 minute was ever required to make its moves. Even late game in a huge world.

Kohan - best RTS game ever. Still play it online actually although it has got harder to get multiplayer games. Who did you and Tormy use to play as?

Have you played Dominions 3, or Civilization 4? I'm sure their designers did their best to reduce ai thinking time, but on the largest maps even a good computer can take a looong time to calculate multiple ai actions.

I'm not totally sure about this, but I think I read once that one thing that allowed GalCiv2 to have such good AI was that it computed what it would do on the AI's turn while the player was moving, instead of waiting until the end turn button was clicked. I never had to wait as long between turns in GalCiv2 as I did in Civ4, so I'm guessing that the latter didn't use this method.

AI rarely has high priority and AI thinking time probably even less.

Dominions 3 AI doesn't think while you are playing like a good simultaneous turn AI should. Civ 4 was kind of different since things could actually happen mid turn that it might have to think about.

Turn based games also mean that multithreading is far, far easier than normal. One of the main problems with multithreading is that the threads need to be synced up perfectly or you're in for a crash and some nightmare debugging. With turn based games (especially simultaneous turns) all the AI can run their own separate thinking thread that goes to whatever core is free. They make their decisions separately and then see how it goes (as would real players). All that matters is that they eventually all get done. They don't need to constantly be in sync and they would start thinking the second you start your turn. I'm going to be pretty disappointed if the AI isn't given its own threads.

Dominions3 is a bad comparison. What takes time for a Dominions3 game to host is not ai but fight resolution. Even with only human players on a big map, if you have a few battles with hundreds of soldiers lasting 50 turns, then it's long. Civ IV on the other hand is slow.

As for the ai taking tuns as we do, yes it's possible that it'll be faster than us, but you have to avoid expensive algorithms.

Ouch...not to mention, that the Dominions 3. AI is very bad. Even a 8y old kid should be able to beat the AI on the highest [IIRC impossible?] diff. level.

I think that a incredible AI is a must for this game. Regardeless of the Multiplayer aspect of the game. This game seems to be a revolution of sorts in this kind of game. Moreoever the way it being made will make this game a game people will play for years if not a decade or two.  One thing you do not want to hear his.. to bad the AI sucks it would of been a hell of a game. MOM still lives even though the AI sucks.

Let s hope Elemental will live just as long without the sucking part.