| Now processors have clockspeeds that are 500 times higher and about a million times more powerful. So let's calculate how much more complex Galactic Civilizations II is compared to chess. Hmm, about a million times. |
You must be a geezer like I am. I used to play Reach For the Stars on an Apple IIe with an 8 bit 1 Mhz 6502 processor with 64K of ram with an access time around 500ns. Played that game from 1983 until the motherboard died in 1995. Great game. That game certainly used the concept of making computer players smarter by giving them more resources or what you call "cheating".
As you say, processor speeds, bus widths, memory sizes and speeds have dramatically increased over the years. I would conservatively estimate the net total performance increase in "PC" hardware in the last 25 years to be about 10,000. Forget about the specifics of GCII for a moment and just consider the equivilent level of improvement in software overall. A lot of the improvements are in the area of graphics and user interface. Though clearly an improvement how much has this contributed to net productivity? I would say to be generous perhaps it's doubled. This is a subjective opinion, but to say that software improvements have resulted in actual productivity improvements on the order of 10 times would be extremely generous. So PC's today are 10,000 times faster and we can actually accomplish about 10 times the work we used to be able to. Where's the missing 1000 times improvement in hardware performance gone. Well, I believe Mr. Gates wastes a significant portion of it. I also believe a fair amount is wasted in the volumes of c++ (or whatever) code that's since replaced finely tuned assembly code. But most of the hardware performance improvement is simply left in the box. At work I have a 3.5 Ghz Xeon processor whose main purpose is for me to answer email and other standard word processing chores. A couple of times a year I might actually use all of that horsepower to auto-route a board I've designed. It might take me an hour or two. Ten years ago it would take me 4 to 8 hours to do on a 600 Mhz Alpha workstation.
The point of this rather long digression is that GCII is not 10^6 times more complex than your chess program from days gone by, it's probably closer to 10 times as complex with beautiful graphics and a gui interface.
Anyway, you asked a couple of questions based on the following statement.
| Now I realize you are never going to program a computer to act like a person. |
With this statement you're essentially dismissing the game as unworthy of play without multiplayer. There are certainly people that share this sentiment, but I think there are many more that don't. In my opinion, this is one of the best PC games, if not the best, of all time. If you give it an honest play you will most likely become as addicted to it as most others here are.
Anyway, to address your specific questions. My understanding is that multiplayer will eventually be available, but will be developed seperately in conjunction with an future MMO type game and then back fitted into GCII. Others here can perhaps give more detail than I can.
The length of time for a game will probably be very dependent on the exact mechanics of multiplayer, but I take about 40 hours to play a single player game of the type you describe. I can't imagine multiplayer could be faster (unless your opponents quit the instant you appear to have the advantage).
