A quick update on performance. I am 20 years into the current campaign, which has one player race, two starting NPRs, a decent-sized Swarm presence and several Precursor systems. There is nothing substantive missing in terms of performance. Diplomacy won't make much difference and AI enhancements will be relatively minor performance-wise compared to the existing AI. I should mention here that the AI is doing a huge amount more than the VB6 AI.
There are 274 systems with 21,200 system bodies.
There are 585 fleets and 1252 ships, of which 284 are civilian ships.
There are 597 populations, although only 50 of those have colonists.
Finally, bear in mind this is running in debug mode on a PC that is almost four years old.
A 5-day cycle is taking about 3.5 seconds and a 1-day increment about 2.7 seconds. Orbital movement with asteroids on requires 0.016 seconds. Each detection phase is running in about 0.003 seconds, although I need a campaign with a lot of races in Sol before becoming excited about that number
. The base AI routine during each increment is taking about 0.05 seconds. That will increase a little during combat.
The main time sink is movement orders. There are currently 316 fleets underway with a total of 1047 outstanding orders. While acting on those orders for all 316 fleets only takes about 0.05 seconds, in a one day turn there are 48 increments, each with a movement phase.
Considering that C# Aurora is doing far more work than VB6, I am more than happy with the current performance. I've been playing Battletech recently and the AI mechs literally take about 10 seconds each to decide where to move and fire
