Well we are expecting sick things now then!

One thing I'm not sure how it's gonna work is in multiplayer. If two human players, say, play against two or three computer players, in which player's computer are the AI calculations taking place??

I can well understand your reluctance to take on explaining this to everyone. Asynchronous processing is indeed a bear to program for. There are lots of special instructions to understand that are almost mandatory in making sure that your data, or even your memory assignments, don't get messed up. If you are not careful you could end up with memory overlays, or thinking you have memory you have already released back to the OS. You need locks to coordinate access to data by many coincidental threads. You need to make sure data you were about to change isn't being changed on another thread to something that only that other thread understands. And much more.

Congrats Frogboy. Hope you don't mind with some suggestions on the Ai.

I would like to see all the players taking up a fair share of the map after the colony rush. I've noticed that about two or three Ai's are usually dominant, and at least three are usually underpowered. You might have one with a super army with 4 planets. I would like to see this to be more even. If we get something like the Yor again where you are forced to play these differently than the other species then the Ai still needs to know how to play these. An example is ab economic stradegy was not going to work for the Yor, but you were going to need a farming stradegy. This seemed to be something the Ai couldn't do.

The Ai needs to be able to adjust its taxes, so it can be able to control its approval to grow reasonably. Everyone needs to care about morale research improvements and research. Lets not have building farms to the point where the morale is brought down to a low level so the empire can't grow. I think the Ai should set the planetary populations to 20 billion each.

I think that the Ai shouldn't terraform tiles until the other tiles are used up on the planet, You should probably not upgrade improvements until your planet can afford it. If the opponent has a better improvement then it should be able to change the current structure on the planet with it. 

I think all the Ai's should build improvements on the planet.

I think that a minimum that the Ai should be concerned with is what the game suggests. What I mean is that it should have a 100 in research, economics, and military. I know that the techs are classified into subcatagorys. Planetary improvements and ship components should also be classified this way. With as small as catagories as possible. When these things are classified like this then the Ai has information it can draw on. When what it is doing doesn't work then it can start to change to a different thing in the catagory. How you do this I'm not sure maybe it could be random. Eliminating what doesn't work until it can compete with the player. The computer will need to save this information when you save the game. That way it can learn. If it has advanced espionage or is close to you it can observe what you are doing to try to counter you. The player will need to be able to reset this. You could even download this from multiplayer on the internet,

again pne way to do this is try random stuff till something works against the opponents. I think this should be as hard as it gets before it cheats on advanced algorithms or maybe have a learn mode. The player should be able to reset this.

We are excited too, Brad. This will be an exciting ride towards the final release Anno Domini 2015. I can't wait to be a part of the alpha/beta of this game.

It could be, but in C# and .net4.5 it's actually pretty straight forward. It even got better with concurrent lists and async/await keywords, but I'm not going too much to details. However, the question is, what do these guys use for GC3? Somehow I don't think it is the .NET, because they and you make this so big issue.

I just hope the AI will keep things interesting on easier levels too.

All of this sounds really great. Maybe even bit too much ambitious. How will it work, if AI will be programmed to take advantage of different computers in MP, or Virtualization if one do not have internet connection or play single player?  I can already hear people being worried about internet aspect of the game. For me personaly, if it makes AI better, I am all for it, but I live in a country where internet connection is not an issue.

However considering the fact, that game will be digitaly distributed only. And the fact that you are trying to make something revolutionary here, there need to be some sacrifices. Same with the graphics and memory, 64bit is must. So if this can do the same for the AI, it is worth doing it.

Just make sure, you take your time to do it right, and make it so, that its easy to improve in the future, without rewroting whole stuff like in the Elemental.

In this case, "virtualized" means that he's taken the game state and made a copy of it. The AI can do stuff in that virtualized version and play a few turns ahead to see which one it likes the best without impacting the real game state (for example). Being 64 bit and multicore, you can do a lot of stuff that just isn't practical in a 32 bit single core design.

I don't know about the MP stuff, but they've said repeatidly that it's a SP focused game so I can't imagine the AI being handicapped if you're not playing in MP. The AI might be handicapped if you never get online as it will need to connect to the metaverse to do things like use popular player ship designs, though.

The trick there is that if you're just using "await foo.DoStuff()" form the UI thread, you're not actually getting parallelism. In that context it uses cooperative multitasking and yields the existing thread when it's waiting on a blocking call. That maintains UI responsiveness, but isn't running things in parallel. (It can run things in parallel if you use it in some other contexts, though.)

So even in C#, they'd probably have to be using the thread pool or spinning up threads to do what a large game needs to do.

All that said, if I had to guess what they're using, I'd go with C++. Maybe Brad will be willing to enlighten us.

I am excited that you are excited.  That excitement pushes inspiration and leads to higher quality work.  The only way you are going to exceed your success on GalCv2 is to have that excitement, that inspiration, and maybe a little bit of help from your friends.

Good luck.  I consider your "hobby" work with AI to be part of the overall evolution of AI that is occurring in all aspects of computer work.  Watson and GalCiv and all AIs in between are part of a grand effort to create Artificial Intelligence sufficient to challenge humans to become intelligent as well.  Gaming AI techniques can only help the more "serious" projects whether we readily see the connections or not. 

Keep up the good work.  Not only does it provide more enjoyment for us players, it is fulfilling some cosmic mission.  (Well, possibly helping some cosmic mission in some tangential way.)  (But that counts!!)

True, not like. But the real trick is here:

var Temp=foo.DoStuff();

bar.DoSomethingElse();

var ReturnHere=await Temp;

And the DoStuff probably wants to run in parallel with Task.Run or something. What I'm trying to say, is that .NET is full of tools and sugar candy for thread programming. As long as you'll keep few basics in mind, it should be piece of cake.

Yeah, for sure. It's a good framework. I don't know how popular it is for games though.

There has been few. I don't know about the really big names, but I think the Distant Worlds is one example. The cross-platform requirement is probably one of the biggest reasons someone would use something else. But in the MS only worlds .NET should be rather attractive one, because that is where MS is pushing us all.

Are you still going to use linear bonuses for AI? Differentiating them via exponential graphs (earlier power peaks etc. for different AI's depending on difficulty) could help balance them at higher difficulty levels, where you usually see one AI performing better overall. (at least it did in Galciv2, and also did it somewhat in FE:LH) Any sort of experimenting would be awesome to be honest, and if you made it moddable, much money will be spent

Admittedly, the asynchronous and multiprocessor programming I did was closer to the machine level than what is required for GC3, but I have been retired for 13 years now and had not been aware that there were some newer programming languages that helped in these areas, yet I should have expected them. Even so, I wouldn't be surprised if the devs found some of the newer programming languages lacking in some instances, simply because it takes time for any programming language to "mature". I am sure Brad & co are quite busy, but maybe they can give us a simple  and approximate count of the number of work/arounds they have had to create to solve deficiencies in the programming language(s) ability to handle asynchronicity?