Hiding the player's ship movements at start of turn + AI only All-Vision |
I notice that when there are several tens of ships in a system, there's lag to just load up the system. At the start of a player's turn, it seems the game checks every single ship for movement orders which means a lot of systems are loaded up and displayed.
I know turn processing and ship movement is slowed mostly by the inefficient pathing algorithm - we discussed this elsewhere. But I wanted to know if we could make it optional to watch our ships move at the start of the turn - accelerate this phase of the turn, as it really does take ages to load up so many different systems for ship movement to be shown every turn.
As for the ship movement algorithm... it probably will take some time to get it improved. If the next public patch doesn't fix this (and improve the AI), I'm going to start a game with 100% vision on so that the AI at least doesn't do as many stupid things. Would make it actually challenging if AI fleets knew where to head to etc.
Actually... can we add an option in Settings.txt to only let the AI see everything? A known problem of the AI is that it forgets things like "this warp point has enemy defences on the other side" and "there was an enemy colony here".
The A.I seeing everything
The A.I seeing everything kind of makes a lot of the techs you and the A.I research pointless.
Except that sometimes, as
Except that sometimes, as mentioned, they carry them out in strange ways. It's kind of nice to know that your ship has decided to patrol the same two hexes endlessly, contrary to your orders.
It would emphasis cloaking
I really can't think of much tech that would become pointless actually. It's only "basic sensors" that would go obsolete.
Well using the ancient race
Well using the ancient race trait you can get around a huge amount of problems the AI has with sensors, I used it on my new AI and I found a 30-50% increase in its colonisation rate alone; thus all AI's I design will now have it, cheap I know but it puts the AI and human on a more level par when it comes to scouting systems.
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Tarsus Race and new AI for Download! v0.6
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Ancient race doesn't...
Ancient race only lets you see the entire map - it doesn't let you see exactly where other colonies and ships are. 100% Vision primarily means the AI does less stupid things and never 'forgets' where a big garrison is or where my colonies were.
Ancient Race: nope, no panacea for A/I problems,
But is sure helps early game for the A/I to have a menu of things to colonize -- solves the A/Is surveying bottleneck, and allows it to keep on an even footing with players for a few turns more....
Of course things still get nasty for the A/I when the empires have grown to the size where you have separate operational and strategic concerns.
Agreed it helps
Certainly it's an easy way to give the AI a helping hand at the start. I'm mostly concerned with the combat aspects of mid-late game, where I'm willing to sacrifice realism for a chance to have the AI (competently) invade me for once.
I feel your pain
I second the first thing. If you have more than ten ships period, it's a real pain to have to watch each one individually carry out its orders.
It would be much better if there was an option to have the ships move behind the scenes while you're busy doing something useful like checking the Empire log. After all, you already know what orders you gave them. You don't have to see them carried out.