AI unit cheat on Deity - Proof!

Ok, either I'm completely out of my mind, or I have hard proof that the AI can do things with unit building the human player can't.

Situation: The Greek land two units, a Hoplite and a Swordsman, next to one of my cities. There is only one Galley of theirs around (and I can proove that!), so there can't be more than two units. Also, only two are shown.



I move two Immortals as close as possible (can't get them into the city ). Next turn, the Greek Swordsman kills the sole defender. The city falls, and the Greek Hoplit moves in.


Before my counterattack, there is no second Galley in view!


I counterattack right away and kill the Hoplite. Another is shown!!!!!!!

WTH??????? Where does he come from??????? The Greek can't have produced him in that city, and they can't have brought him ashore that turn!!!!!!!!

I kill him, and sure enough, there is the badly hurt Swordsman left in the city!!!!!!!!


both pics are in-fight. Check to save to see that it's true! here's a pic directly after I killed the two Hoplites showing I moved and fought with both Immortals!



I kill the Swordsman, and the town is mine again:


here's several savegames, all in one zip:

AI unit cheat 1. sav - just after the Greek troops landed
AI unit cheat 2.sav - after I moved my troops

make sure you check the coastline - I have Great Ligthhouse and the Greeks don't know Navigation yet! There is NO second Galley!!!! Also, they have only known about me for 5 turns, so even the one-Galley-invasion was fast.

then there's
AI unit cheat 3 - after the Greek took the town
AI unit cheat 4 - I moved my new Galley out to proove that there's no second Galley
just chek this out, then use the two elite Immortals to attack Ulundi!

the savegames



Am I crazy???

Or is this another AI cheat we weren't told about?????????

I have seen this before, a city I had conquered flipped back to babylon. it was fully surrounded by my territory, and any Babylonian sneaking around ould have stuck out like the balls on a dogs ass. I was sure there wasn't any unit moving around. I attacked the town the next turn (so no time even for rushbuilding, besides, the Babs were Despotic and the town didn't shrink) - and there was a second defender!!!!!!!

I thought I was crazy, or I had missed the unit moving around, but the game shown above makes me sure:


The AI gets a free defender when taking a town from the human player, and gets an additional (second) defender when receiving a city via culture-flip!!!!


edit: It appears possible the AI created the extra units via pop-rushing that is impossible to human players. So perhaps the cheat is easier pop-rush for the AI!

To test this, I used above game and moved my Immortal out of the city so that it was undefended. The Greeks declared war, moved into the city. I attacked, and there was no mysterious second Hoplite!

So the AI gets a free additional defender when culturflips occur
or when it takes the town in a fight!

Look, we all know the AI cheats especially on the higher levels. We never had this kind of stuff with Civ 2 as it simply changed the percentages for combat on different levels which was OK with me.

Here's a cheat at Regent for those who still think the AI does NOT cheat at that level:

This is just one of many examples. . .

Early Industrial era. There is a six tile hunk of open land in my civ owing to a war and a destroyed town. Next thing I know a transport from a different civ is depositing military units and a settler there.

Now, it is a cheat they knew about those tiles, and I am certain the AI gets freebie settlers when tiles open up due to a razing who immediately head for the open tile even while still at war with me! Which is really dumb as they get destroyed. But that is not the cheat I refer to here.

What I did was go to autosave and go back several turns. I occupied every open coastal hex with a unit. Guess what? The transport never showed up!! And that is a cheat - the AI sees the entire map all the time, even at Regent.

Of course it cheats.

Great work !!!!

I looked at the saved game files 2 (290ad) and 3 (300ad) (before and after the attack). The extra hoplite's internal "unit ID" is decimal 259, which does not exist in the 2nd saved game (290ad) So it didn't teleport it, it created it out of thin air!!!

Originally posted by Lt. 'Killer' M.
To test this, I used above game and moved my Immortal out of the city so that it was undefended. The Greeks declared war, moved into the city. I attacked, and there was no mysterious second Hoplite!

So the AI gets a free additional defender when culturflips occur
or when it takes the town in a fight!

Click to expand...

I disagree with this though. I took your 2nd (290ad) save game, moved the defender out of town, the greeks moved in and still created an extra hoplite in 1 turn! Are you sure that's what happened in your game?

Everyone know Firaxis made some modification through patch to stop human doing some ( what they call exploits), like city trading, despot rush...ect. But i bet you 100 virtual box that they are happy with this kind of AI cheating, very frustrating. Did you ever play a chess game where AI receive a free knight or a free bishope ? Wait for the next Firaxian chessgame.

Originally posted by sumthinelse
Great work !!!!

I looked at the saved game files 2 (290ad) and 3 (300ad) (before and after the attack). The extra hoplite's internal "unit ID" is decimal 259, which does not exist in the 2nd saved game (290ad) So it didn't teleport it, it created it out of thin air!!!

Click to expand...

even better work by you!!!!

I see something strange, you proove it's a cheat in 5 min!

About the missing extra Hoplite: I'm pretty sure, since I only used the two elite Holites, not the third in the north. But I coudl be wrong... Will test now!

OK,l I was wrong, it did appear!

ok look I don't want Civ fans to get all upset because I really love this game too but this is just insane. You ruin the integrity of the game by doing this $hit. I want to play the game and Fireaxis wants to make it difficult I suggest they find a way that isn't lame if they don't have the necessary brain power to do that, then stay the hell away from cheats and just give us one level.

I mean what the hell does having 6 levels matter if on 5 of those levels there is cheating . They are misrepresenting the levels, rather they should call it cheating intensity, from none, light, somewhat, frequent, intense, overwhelming, fergetaboudit.

sumthinelse, could you check how many defenders are in Corinth???? I gatheryou know how to do that......

Same game, few turns later (already won domination with 11100 points ), Corinth flipped two turns ago, no chance of a defender moved into. So if there's more tha 1, it's cheat again.....


test.zip

Originally posted by Lt. 'Killer' M.
sumthinelse, could you check how many defenders are in Corinth???? I gatheryou know how to do that......

Click to expand...

In 540ad (test.sav, that's the one you want?) Corinth has 2 hoplites: 1 regular and 1 veteran.

OK, so when a city flips to me I get one defender, but when it flips to the AI (which I assume is more likely on deity level?) they get 2 defenders.

So you have proved that the AI gets an extra defender when it takes a city with ground troops, and it gets 2 defenders when the city flips, while the human gets only one on a culture flip.

What program are you using sumthinelse ?

I can only say one thing:
Killer for President!!

What I haven't seen mentioned yet is something made your old city go from size 4 to size 2. They either had starvation, drafted, or poprushed to lose the 2 extra citizens.

If you dislike the AI "cheating", then why do you keep playing the game so much? They give the computer some benefits (call it "cheating") since they can't stick a human brain into your system that is smarter than yours to compete against you.

Since this is obviously a major deal to you, why don't you come up with constructive ways to allow the AI to be more difficult without "cheating"? If presented in a positive and intelligent manner, they will listen. For the record, I am not saying that you are being unpolite or unintelligent, just what they listen to; this according to them. It doesn't mean they will implement them, but they will consider them. They have listened to a number of polite and intelligent responses on other things: for examples: airfields and outposts, the J command and other improvements due in both PTW, but also free in the next patch.

This is certainly interesting, though I'm not convinced completely since it seems you are using a modded copy of the game. More importantly though, why is it such a big deal that the game is "cheating" you? It's well known that the game isn't fair on higher difficulty levels; there's no way the AI can compete with humans otherwise. In a straight-up fight, the human SHOULD win. If you've found something new, you've made a valuable contribution to the Civ3 community, and I congratulate you on it. But why the constant harping about "cheating?" If anything it should make you glad that you can beat an AI that gets even more advantages than we initially thought!

Originally posted by kring


If you dislike the AI "cheating", then why do you keep playing the game so much? They give the computer some benefits (call it "cheating") since they can't stick a human brain into your system that is smarter than yours to compete against you

Click to expand...

I think that some of our community go too far in their criticism of CIV3, and I think Firaxis has some very fine people who are acting in good faith to improve the game. Since the word "improve" can be very subjective, it will always be impossible to please everyone, but I personally am grateful for the efforts Firaxis has made to give us what we want.

Have you ever talked to other players about computer opponents before? The word "cheating" is widely used to describe computer opponenents which use undocumented aspects of their control of the game mechanisms to gain advantages not available to the human player. I emphasize the word undocumented because I do not agree with players who use the word "cheating" with documented, configurable AI advantages such as the AI to AI trade rate. I suspect that other game programs also "cheat" because it's expensive to make a game challenging without cheating.

If a chess program moved a pawn 2 squares to promote it to a queen, the universal response would be "cheating!" The game Stratego is like some aspects of CIV in that "the fog of war" is supposed to apply to both players: you are not supposed to know what enemy units are where until you "earn" that information by discovering it in the proper way. When the human players saw what the Stratego program was doing, guess what word they used to describe it?

For some of us, we try to learn about the game to become better players, but this becomes difficult when the AI is playing with a different set of rules and we have to discover what those rules are. Unlike chess players who, finding that their chess program was cheating, renounce the program in disgust, we continue to play, but sometimes we think we should not have to discover the rules of the game the hard way. We love the CIV series anyway.

Since this is obviously a major deal to you, why don't you come up with constructive ways to allow the AI to be more difficult without "cheating"?

Click to expand...

First let me say that some of the players' requests can be somewhat contradictory: "Make the AI more challenging" vs. "Take out the cheats." "Implement this new feature" vs. "Make the game faster, cheaper, smaller."

OK, here are my suggestions Perhaps Firaxis has already tried some of them:

• 
  
  * Please try to put these "equalizing" mechanisms in the editor and make them configurable.
  
  * Try to strengthen the AI's "planning" in miltary campaigns. Please try to avoid sending units to attack a city that will take 50 moves to get there, where the human can advance in technology and number of defenders during the long, hopeless march. Study how good human players plan to attack a city and then execute that attack. I have noticed some improvement lately (patch 1.21f). The AI was going to attack a city but then realized that it was not strong enough and "decided" not to.
  
  * Please try to work toward an AI that plays well in general, not sleazily. I realize that this is a long-time proposition, not something you whip out in one day or one week, and it must be considered against other items in the budget. I also realize that Infogames/Firaxis is competing against other game manufacturers whose games probably "cheat" but they don't receive the scrutiny that CIV3 does. Firaxis has inherited a wonderful legacy but also "Great Expectations" from its fans.
  

Originally posted by D9phoenix
What program are you using sumthinelse ?

Click to expand...

Gramphos CIV3 multitool http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7787

Also use a hex editor sometimes.

Those all sound like good suggestions to me; also well written.

I may not like some of the things the AI does, but it doesn't stop me from enjoying the game or playing it.

I have been learning, personally and also from the various fora (CivFanatics, Apolyton, and 1BC mostly) the cute little tricks of the AI. I would like to know some of the answers you mentioned in your post, and heartily endorse them.

Hopefully, the next patch willl provide some of these things, if not there, maybe in C3PTW.

Who cares if the AI cheats? If you can beat them, then so what? If you can't win on diety because of the cheating, play on a lower level. If you can win the game and have fun, then play whatever level you want. Don't go playing diety and then complain that the AI gets advantages.

It has been said before that the only way to have the AI keep up or surpass the human player is to give it production advantages. Humans can even that out with new strategies and manuevers to win the game.

Originally posted by God
Who cares if the AI cheats? If you can beat them, then so what? If you can't win on diety because of the cheating, play on a lower level. If you can win the game and have fun, then play whatever level you want. Don't go playing diety and then complain that the AI gets advantages.

It has been said before that the only way to have the AI keep up or surpass the human player is to give it production advantages. Humans can even that out with new strategies and manuevers to win the game.

Click to expand...

As said before, the advantages are understood, the problem is with units poping up mysteriously.

Hey Killer, I remembered a test that I did a long time ago. I noticed a weird thing with a unit poping up when it shouldn't have. My weird situation happened when I was at peace with country X and it was early in the game and I wanted to take them out. I moved my soldiers right next to the main and only city and I got warned to move or declar war. I refused to move so war was declared. Next turn when I went to attack I noticed that there was now not just an enemy warrior in the city but a spearman also. I swore up and down that the computer cheated and was ranting and raving to TF about it. I thought long and hard about it and came up with the conclusion that the AI could have rushed the spearman. Let me go into more detail how the rounds happened:

Round 1 My turn: I move my troops (warriors or spearmen, doesn't really matter, 1 attack) into the area of enemy civ. I end my turn. AI city is defended by atleast 1 warrior.
Round 1 AI turn: AI warns me to move out of his territory and I say no problem, I will move.
Round 2 My turn: I move my troops next to the enemy city. I end my turn. AI city is still defended by atleast 1 warrior.
Round 2 AI turn: AI demands that I move out of his territory. I say "take a flying leap" and declare war.
Round 3 My turn: I attack and lose because there is now a spearman defending the AI city.

I was wondering how the AI could have gotten the spearman between his part of turn 2 and my part of turn 3. There are a few things that could have happened.
1. The unit/building production resolution happens at the same time for every civ, and this is at the begining of the human's turn.
2. The AI cheated. Since I didn't have any proof I assume that #1 is correct.

Also: I have no idea what the AI was producing so they could have been producing a Settler in that city before hand and easily would have had enough shields for the spearman when it changed over. I do know that if I didn't declare war that a spearman was NOT created.

Maybe someone from Firaxis can confirm this or already has?
Sorry for the long drawn out rambling, but I am extremely tired.