The AI CHEATS! (Admitted to by Sid) lol

And it cheated in YOUR favor you bunch of pansy whiners!

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gdc-2010-borderlands,2580-4.html

This paragraph particularly depressed me:
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Perhaps the funniest anecdote he shared about how much psychology affects gameplay was his discussion of combat odds in Civilization Revolution. When a player faces an opponent, and has 3:1 odds, Meier noted. That means the player should lose one out of four times. But if players lost at 3:1, they were mystified: “I have 3:1 odds! I shouldn’t lose!”
--

I've never been a player to ever gripe about spearmen beating tanks, once in awhile (like say 1 time out of twenty, which seemed to happen in my games and wa OK), but to hear that Firaxis caved to those pansy whiners makes me sad.

I hope this kind of crippling is left OUT of CiV. I'm OK with losing once in while.

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Of course the AI cheats, go play on Immortal or Diety where it gets a huge tech bonus to compensate for its lack of intelligence. Personally, I stick to Prince and below, because it's not fun being 8 techs behind the AI civs

Wait... where is the "cheating" in that description?

God you guys can't read?

The title is ironical- or caustic humor- pointing out the random number generator is tweaked to favor the player and reports the WRONG odds therefor in revolutions. I hope this kind of seriously dumbed down crap doesn't hit Civ V.

Brawndo at least TRY to read the content of a post before going off on some canned message to someone who's been here a heck of a lot longer than you- and may actually be ahead of you, you know?


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Dearmad, this is the second thread of yours I've replied in in quick succession.

Got a question for you ? Were you raised to be deliberately rude or have you worked on it ?

This is CivFanatics not the WoW forums a little politeness would not kill you.

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Do you understand odds? If you have 3:1 odds that means you have a 75% chance to win, and 25% to lose (which is one-in-four to lose). I believe he's chuckling at the notion that people misunderstand how that works, which seems to include you. There's no cheating, for the computer or the player, involved here.

Dearmad said:

God you guys can't read?

The title is ironical- or caustic humor- pointing out the random number generator is tweaked to favor the player and reports the WRONG odds therefor in revolutions. I hope this kind of seriously dumbed down crap doesn't hit Civ V.

Brawndo at least TRY to read the content of a post before going off on some canned message to someone who's been here a heck of a lot longer than you- and may actually be ahead of you, you know?

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U mad bro?

I read the article, but didn't find it worth commenting on. But it is true that the AI "cheats" by getting all kinds of handicaps, because this is an easy out for programmers instead of actually designing the AI to use more complex behavior as the difficulty level - Oh noes!!! You played the Forum Hierarchy Card! I guess my more recent Join Date precludes me from these discussions. I'll just go now...

Brawndo, do you really think acting all bitter/mocking is going to help your case? You misread dearmad's post, and got very aggressive with no justification. Come on.

I think both parties are taking things too seriously.

Brawndo said:

U mad bro?

I read the article, but didn't find it worth commenting on. But it is true that the AI "cheats" by getting all kinds of handicaps, because this is an easy out for programmers instead of actually designing the AI to use more complex behavior as the difficulty level - Oh noes!!! You played the Forum Hierarchy Card! I guess my more recent Join Date precludes me from these discussions. I'll just go now...

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If you have any slight notion of how difficult / if not impossible it would be to program AI to be able to beat a human opponent with all things even, and under a tight budget, then you wouldn't even mention what you just did.

Is it possible? Perhaps... but the company would cease to be able to actually make a profit due to the expense of such an endeavour.

They did do work on the AI and setup 4 AI levels to control different aspects of the game in tandem with one another... This is good news in my mind, but we will have to see how well it works.

I am not overly hopeful though for terrific outstanding uber AI, as I believe it will follow along or be close in some regards to the AIntelligence of the earlier games in the franchise. (Although comparing them cannot really be done anymore, since 5 is a different beast in combat with 1upt and hexes)

tom2050 said:

They did do work on the AI and setup 4 AI levels to control different aspects of the game in tandem with one another... This is good news in my mind, but we will have to see how well it works.

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Worst case scenario? The four AI levels don't work in tandem with one another.

So far reports are that the AI operates intelligently. That may only be on lower difficulties, though, as that seems like that's what the reviewers are playing. Whether that's good news or bad... I can't tell. But I am indeed hopeful and have a good feeling about it.

PinkHammurabi said:

So far reports are that the AI operates intelligently. That may only be on lower difficulties, though, as that seems like that's what the reviewers are playing. Whether that's good news or bad... I can't tell. But I am indeed hopeful and have a good feeling about it.

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I'm hopeful but why would the AI get dumber as the difficulty gets higher?

That's exactly my point. The only reason I'm not sure is that we, so far (to my knowledge) have not seen any reviews done on harder difficulties. That, plus we don't know if the reviewers are crap players and can only play on low difficulties, and therefore can't really assess the AI.

I can speculate! Just like everyone else in this forum, Ha!

The way i'd lay out the AI is, in any situation, the AI would choose from a list of possible responses. for lower difficulties, it's designed to pick a response that's less optimal (like a newbie might, unwisely chopping forests and wasting hammers), and for higher, more likely to pick an optimal response. (like a seasoned player who knows how best to use land around a city)

From what i've heard of the Civ5 AI, it's layered, with one AI choosing from a list of large scale goals, and passing it down to lower AIs to carry it out. So the top level is like "Invade that Civ". Mid level "Ok, we need an army, move X swordsmen, a couple cavalry, and a catapult towards the bordeR" and low level which controls the individual movements of these troops.

So yeah, it kinda cheats in a way, purposefully choosing bad actions in an easy setting, and good ones, in a difficult setting. However, Deity level players are very good at the game, and probably wouldn't like it if the hardest setting was easy for them to win. So they add in "cheats" giving AI players unfair advantages to preserve the difficulty the human player feels. Remember, a computer can beat an average human at chess, but it took a supercomputer to beat a grand master.

Ultimately, the un-cheating AI is only as good as the amount of choices and layers it gets - more of either demands additional processing power. So they balance out the AI's intelligence and CPU demands so that it will run decently on enough computers to sell a lot of games. So the real reason for cheating AI, is like everything else in the business, about money.

One thing that would be interesting though, is if we could tweak the amount of complexity at which AI's make decisions, if we have an above spec CPU, or don't mind longer between-turns.

But back on topic, we really can't assess it without seeing the game first.

@Tarkhan
The problem with what you describe is making good AI for the highest levels in the first place.
Ideally, with balanced odds, and 8 civs on the map, the AI should win 7 out of 8 games, against an average player. But this has never been achieved. Most players play at higher levels, and expect to win fairly often. So any time that would be spent on making the AI dumber on low levels, would be better spent trying to make the AI smarter, so that it could win more often with less of an advantage.

Another ridiculous tangent-based argument is brewing...

Brawndo said:

But it is true that the AI "cheats" by getting all kinds of handicaps, because this is an easy out for programmers instead of actually designing the AI to use more complex behavior as the difficulty level

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One does not cheat, when one is given a handicap and uses it. Bonus is a handicap. Stating rules and then violating them would be cheating.

Are you cheating at low levels, when you get a bonus? No, you are following the rules. Games take long enough and as Tom said would be cost prohibitive to make the not require a bonus. Probably would require enven greater system requirements.

Yes a bit of an improvement could be done, but then the game would take a lot longer to hit the shelves and neither the players nor the company wants that.

bjbrains said:

Brawndo, do you really think acting all bitter/mocking is going to help your case? You misread dearmad's post, and got very aggressive with no justification. Come on.

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No justification? Dearmad was being very rude for no reason whatsoever. Brawndo certainly had every right to post that way.

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