10x faster AI!
Posted: 15 Aug 2013, 17:12
Well, not precisely. But it turns out it's pretty easy to manipulate how long the AI spends thinking before it picks a decision, by lying to it about how much time has elapsed since it started.
The attached patch (run it in the same directory as Magic.exe) cuts AI thinking time to 1/10 normal. I haven't noticed any obvious weakening of the AI in a dozen or so games; it still makes roughly the same mix of fairly smart and astoundingly dumb decisions that it did before. Your mileage (and CPU power) may vary, though, so I'll put together something to make it configurable for the next mainline release.
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This is now in the September 2013 patch, and configurable in config.txt as "AiDecisionTime".
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This is now in the September 2013 patch, and configurable in config.txt as "AiDecisionTime".