meap

Regarding the AI difficulty levels, I think that what is the most challenging for a beginner is to develop faster than the AI, or at least fast enough to survive the first attacks. Thus, what about decreasing the rate at which the AI develops its economy (e.g. builds new units, builds new buildings, harvest...) to lower the difficulty of the first levels ? Also, what about increasing the "grace period" before the AI first attack ? These propositions have the advantage to keep all features of the game while making the game significantly easier.

To come back to the original question of this topic, my feeling is that the origin of the huge lag performance problems is still not quite clear and has different sources. Sure, path finding is a source of problem. But I suspect another sources like the AI or stucked units... An status of these issues would indeed help ;-)

If you want to improve the accuracy of your measurements, you can reserve a CPU core for the measured process on linux using the taskset utility and the isolcpus kernel parameter, e.g. boot using isolcpus=1 next start 0ad using taskset -c 1 0ad This should limit the influence of other processes.

I switched to svn and confirm the problem seems to be solved (same game, same parameters). The only performance slowdown I noticed was indeed under a heavy attack from the AI, but it is now completely playable. Thx !

mimo, I played several times with Petra (build 15148P-release) in "Very Hard" mode with pop limit 150 and saw the same perfomance problem : The first time I attack the AI with some decent army (e.g. entering its territory and starting attacking its structures) I see a dramatic decrease in performance, which remains even after the attack. My impression is that it is related to the Petra AI. The command.txt is attached. You should see the performance problems appearing around turn 19000 : BTW, thx for your work on the AI. It is way better now. commands.txt

I completely agree with that, i.e. very hard = hard + cheating. This allows the player to explicit agree with giving the AI an "unfair" advantage.

Agree with that too. BTW, one thing I would do at hard level (compared to medium) is to remove the 'grace period' at the beginning of the game. This would allow the AI to attack before walls and towers are built and making it less predictible. This seems to me pretty easy to implement. I would allow the AI to 'cheat' only at the very hard level. Mmm, if the AI can't build fortress (and thus can't build units effective against walls), that means you are almost invincible unless you play at the highest difficulties. And playing at hard level without the AI building defense towers and walls would be far too easy...

Difficult to answer. Pretty hard to count the number of units attacking me ;-) I would say they were certainly more than 50, maybe 100 but not more. BTW, I played recently and got endless javascript warnings saying "path toBeContinued" after a couple of attacks from AI, maybe after I finished building the walls protecting my territory. The game then started to lag a lot. (Should probably move this to another topic though).

I played a couple of times with Petra Bot in very hard mode but with a pop limit of 150 (to prevent perf problems). I find this mode very challenging (but not impossible), far more than with Aegis (of course). The problem is that I can't finish the game as it begins to lag way too much when I start attacking the AI (each turn it freezes for ~10sec and let me play for about 1sec), but this is another problem... So mode "very hard" can stay like this IMHO.