AI War is able to handle millions of ships. Really.

[Burnstreet]

I just won a defender game with 252 wave lanes. Without doing anything, just watching.

Turns out the AI is not fast enough to kill 118 systems in 15 minutes, even with more than a million ships to use.

Unfortunately I cannot tell the exact number of AI ships at the end since the galaxy statictics don't seem to show ships in carriers or barracks.

The game was diff 7/7, one neinzul, one assassin, realistic hubs 120 planet map, 118 selected, low caps, normal speed.

waves:
160k ships @ ~3min
360k ships @ ~6min
490k ships @ ~9min
750k ships @ ~12min
930k ships @ 14:50
990k ships still incoming

At the last wave the game hung for like 2 minutes on my Q6600 / 4GB RAM and afterward twice for some seconds before returning to running like a charm at 50ms performance profile. The earlier waves hung for a shorter time.

I also got some free achievements like for collecting much knowledge.

Found a bug there: if you have more than 100k available knowledge, the last digit isn't shown.
Another one: according to the statistics, I had -2000 surviving ships at the end.

During all that time, Ai Wars never needed more than 1.5 GB.

[TechSY730]

Hmm. Is there a potential future for AI War to be a CPU and memory benchmark/stress-test?  

[Echo35]

You know what? I'm going to try this now.

[Nalgas]

Unit Cap Scale: Low

That is hilarious to see next to the multiple six digit number ship counts.  If I were on my desktop, I'd so try that right now.  I think an i5 750 could handle it, but I suspect my poor MacBook would burst into flames.

[Colonel J]

Tried this, it was entertaining! Same settings as you but a random map seed. I got Scorched Earth and Neinzul Nester. AI was even further away from winning than in your game, I had about 50 planets still standing after 15mins, the AI didn't manage to attack more than 15 planets at once so was never going to get close.

Performance - ouch. Similar but longer performance hangs to you and even when it was responding it was a mostly unplayable slide show for the last half. Final wave of 1,060,879   Left it running for a while after the 15mins and the next wave hit 1,119,500 but the game was almost permanently stalled at this point and I closed it down for fear of something exploding.

My Macbook 2GHz Intel Core2 and 4GB is still working and didn't melt.

I think I may have voided my warranty though 

[TechSY730]

Clearly, the AI saw how many planets you had and how many defenses you built up, said "this will take too long," and diverted a few of those waves to your CPU. 

[BobTheJanitor]

There's a mantis report that needs to be made for this, but I can't figure out where to even start.

[Colonel J]

Clearly, the AI saw how many planets you had and how many defenses you built up, said "this will take too long," and diverted a few of those waves to your CPU. 

New AI type: Bottlenecker 

[Echo35]

Clearly, the AI saw how many planets you had and how many defenses you built up, said "this will take too long," and diverted a few of those waves to your CPU.  

New AI type: Bottlenecker  

Well Keith did mention the Heap Stacks tactic...

I think I may have voided my warranty though 

Just as long as you didn't let out the magic blue smoke.

[Nalgas]

Awesome.  I finally tried it while I still had it running after tonight's multiplayer game, and aside from getting a little cranky when each wave materialized, it ran fine.  It hangs for a bit when creating a few hundred thousand ships at once, but after that part is done it's smooth until the next wave.

I did get it to eventually crash by leaving it running after "winning" to see how long it would take to capture all of my planets; at some point there were so many ships that the garbage collector exploded.  I still had plenty of free RAM, but I think I remember reading that the game itself has some sort of internal limit.  The wave counter was over 1.3 million at that point, and combined with the attack and threat numbers it was about 2 million total.

I'm rather pleased with how my CPU held up, at least.  Everest said the temperature never went above the low 40s even during the wave generation, and that's just with the stock heatsink/fan that came with it.  The rest of the time under lower load it was barely above room temperature.  Makes me feel slightly better about the socket being obsolete already after barely more than a year (thanks, Intel!) when I see how well it still handles everything I need.  Heh.