unfortunately I haven't found time to test this AI so far, but some thoughts:Zutty wrote: Bad News: A 2048 x 2048 map with ~3000 towns is still unplayable, taking longer than 10 years. Plus the service selection routine is still
may I propose to maybe not look for the globally best solution but possibly for a local maximum. You might define yourself a maximum map size you want to play - and for larger maps you just build a graph for a smaller part of it and only start to incorporate the other parts later into your plan. You cannot go and fill an entire huge map in the beginning anyway.
Another approach would be to make a histogramme of town sizes (if you're dealing with pax only) and only take into account the biggest most xy towns - with the possibility to extend your graph locally with smaller towns in order to improve the efficiency of your network. The latter approach might be similar to an adaptive grid used variously in numerical simulations.
I know both of these two proposals might not be too easy to implement, though. But they're save to work once they're done or the algorithms are extended to other cargos and such.
Regards,
planetmaker