As someone who has played PC strategy games since, well, since there's been PC strategy games to play, the thing that often stifles me is the late game.
Often times, strategy games will bog down due to sheer wait time between turns or just collapsing under their own weight in micro management.
Fallen Enchantress attempts to solve this through the use of a multithreaded game state architecture. What this means is that while you're taking your turn, a bunch of different things get spun off into their own threads. That is, the game multitasks within itself to speed things up.
We did this with Galactic Civilizations to a degree -- there was a background thread that handled the computer players turns. But in the age where people have multiple CPU cores, we can do so much more.
So each turn, the game will create a thread for each player which includes all their stat updating, AI strategizing and general garbage collection. The more cores you have, the faster it'll get.
Below is a video of very late game. If you're familiar with 4X strategy games, note how fast turns move despite there being hundreds of turns and 3 other players in the game.
Fallen Enchantress will be released on October 23rd.
