It has nothing (little, rather) to do with computer speed. While the animation of an army moving is in progress, you can’t do anything when no UI indication to the player, such as graying out the controls.
It doesn’t have anything to do with processing turns or the computer chugging, it’s just not a good architecture. Which is largely okay, since most of the time in SP it’s fine. Try playing with a few players though and it’s a pretty shitty experience because the number of animations being shown starts going up really fast. I don’t blame them, it’s not a smart place to put your limited budget since Classic turns work, it’s just something I hope is better in the next one.
Other TBS games handle it just fine, it’s just a matter of having a better architecture. My hope is that the upgraded engine includes that, but we’ll see. Certainly not a deal breaker for me!
This just isn’t going to die, is it? Unless an application is doing weird tricks so it doesn’t run out of memory, 64 or 32 bits doesn’t matter (outside of super optimized math simulations). It’s usually because multiprocessing is a pain in the ass that took an age an a half to give you good abstractions that didn’t made coders check sync bugs for days, so they avoided doing it too much.
Originally I thought it was another issue, I.e. the game stopping.
The actions being queued up and you being unable to interrupt them is a characteristic of the way the game works, I.e. sequential not actually simultaneous turns.
That I have experienced.
Then why is it more noticeable the longer the game goes on and the larger the maps?
This is why the 15 second rule or variations thereof is used.
I think it’s more a function of more and more of the map being revealed and staying “visible” from city and army sight lines than anything else. I really don’t think it has much to do with the hardware of the machine (assuming the machine can run the game well to begin with). The issue happens (as you say) due to sequential orders in a simultaneous turn not really being “truly” simultaneous. Because what you can’t see (even with fast animations) is abstracted (I suspect an enemy stack moving in a fog of war isn’t "animating whatsoever, but rather teleporting like picking up a moving a chess piece) so with lots of the map covered up the issue is less present because the AI process it’s turns more quickly.
Put another way, If I play on the largest map possible with an underground and as many players as I want but go classic turns, I’ll get a full 144fps gameplay through turn 1 and turn 75. If I put a small map with 1v1 on Simultaneous, it’s inevitable at some point I’ll want to move a stack or interact with something like a city or a hero and level him up, but will not be able to until the AI finishes what it wants to do first.
I just realized that Age of Wonders 3, since it’s 32bit might be able to play on future Windows on Arm based PCs. In a few years, it might be my go to travel game.
Scott already covered most of this, but later game means more of the map revealed combined with significantly more armies which equals significantly longer queues. This is also why more players in MP really starts degrading because of any one of say four players moves an army, sees an army, or takes various other actions, the UI for other players stops working. And with four players in MP, four times the map is already revealed at the start and grows quickly. Worse, those actions are queued sometimes but not all the time which leads to a frustratingly unresponsive UI.
Again, those issues aren’t computationally bound. Animations take a certain amount of time in the maximum speed, and they likely didn’t have enough resources to get a little more precise in their queuing. For example, once a movement order is issued it should be locked. Therefore, once a player initiates that order, other players should be able to start doing stuff. This is how other simultaneous turn games work. They shouldn’t be locked out of setting up build orders in their cities until the animation completes. That should just be UI fluff.
Granted, having a slow computer is going to exacerbate things, but you could be playing on a computer capable of crunching all the numbers in a nanosecond and you’re still going to be waiting for the movement animation to finish.
No joke, xenforo or phpbulletin or whatever the fuck forum software looks so old and busted when I’m used to Discourse now. Modern web design trends happened for good reasons, sometimes.
