Great and very detailed article!

Well, using real battles to benchmark often give you pretty high margin of error if not done properly... Anyway run 100 seasons against RaikoMicro and see the total time seems to say something about the overall performance. And using percentage run time, e.g. PIF time / total run time of your bot may be even better.

Btw, 1000+ highly optimized iterations as worst cases shouldn’t cause you skipped turns, but if you don’t use contiguous memory, and access that in order, several 1000+ cache misses in one turn is enough to kill you imo.