Cart (0)In 2002, the original Strategic Command game was a relatively simple construct. With a limited rule set and a much smaller 62x37 map of approximately 2300 hexes, the requirements for the AI were not necessarily trivial, but in general terms, they were straightforward.
Fast forward to today, and Strategic Command WWII: War in Europe has been expanded into a modifiable hexagonal game engine allowing map sizes of up to 512x512 or 262,144 hexes!
Quality vs. Speed
While it is simpler to have the AI identify targets, calculate optimal results and movement paths on smaller maps, any inefficient AI algorithms can unfortunately reveal themselves to be serious time wasting problems once the map grows up to 100 times larger. Often, the only solution to these problems is a sacrifice in AI quality in order to improve the duration or calculation speed of each AI turn.
While some sacrifices invariably need to be made, a significant reduction in AI quality was never on our acceptable radar. This ultimately led to an overhaul and rethink of the Strategic Command WWII: War in Europe AI in order to address the issue of quality vs. speed.
