Cheating AI Beyond Ridiculous

[Rishara]

I can accept their huge starting tech lead and production/science/happiness/etc bonuses they get on the higher difficulty levels, but in my last game Bismark was running with a gigantic military with -1400 gpt!!!!!!!!!!!! This was an immortal game. Come on.... How come his military wasn't getting disbanded with that deficit??

We better hope they don't fix the tactical AI, because if they do, there probably won't be a way to beat the game at immortal/deity.

 

[r_rolo1]

You are not the first one noticing the permanent deficit AI and their massive armies , don't worry

I strongly suspect that they did the exact same that they done in civ IV and the AI only shows the money it is willing to part off, not the real ammount on the pocket. Join that to some error adding the parcels in the code for that ( like for example, simply get the previous turn cash and deduct expenses without considering what enters in htis turn ) and you get a erroneous deficit display.

OTOH it is alos possible that , like in Civ Iv , they limited the ammount of units that can be disbanded per turn and the AI in question is simply building more than the ones that are being disbanded

 

[Rishara]

OTOH it is alos possible that , like in Civ Iv , they limited the ammount of units that can be disbanded per turn and the AI in question is simply building more than the ones that are being disbanded

I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. I don't think it was an erroneous display, because when he hit that large deficit, he quickly went from having 7K surplus cash to 0.

 

[Bibor]

There is definitely something wrong with the AI cashflow. On Prince, King, Emperor all civs go bankrupt around turn 250.

I saw AIs having as much as -197 GPT (I memorized that number for some reason).

-197 GPT doesn't signalize "too much units" because
a) units take time to build up, even for an AI
b) while building up units, AI positive GPT would get lower turn by turn, not instantly plummet from like +50 to -197.
c) as it would reach 0 GPT AI would not be able to build further because other expenses (bribing city-states, purchasing tiles etc) would get him to 0 balance pretty soon
d) even with gold-rushing, no way in hell that an AI could burn down his treasury so hard to get into -197 GPT just for unit maintenance (the largest amount of AI cash on immortal I've seen was around 3k gold, meaning 10 units tops).

 

[Drawmeus]

I don't know what's going on to allow the AI to continue playing at that kind of negative cashflow, but I'll bet the economic crash has a lot more to do with spamming every building under the sun in every city than it does with military. Watching the buildings the AI constructs, it's pretty clear that it has no sense of which buildings are valuable and which aren't, or of city specialization.

 

[Rishara]

I don't know what's going on to allow the AI to continue playing at that kind of negative cashflow, but I'll bet the economic crash has a lot more to do with spamming every building under the sun in every city than it does with military. Watching the buildings the AI constructs, it's pretty clear that it has no sense of which buildings are valuable and which aren't, or of city specialization.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was the situation here. He had the second (bigger) continent to himself. It was crazy. He conquered everyone on that continent fairly early. Mid game, he was 25 techs ahead of me, and there wasn't really much I could do to catch up (I was ahead of everyone else). I was busy fending off Ghandi and Sulemin's hoards on my continent. By the time I was finished with them, Bismark was already into the future era, and I hadn't even gotten railroad yet. So, while I worked on catching up, I'm sure he just sat there and built up his massive military and all the buildings.

What's sad is that he really should have just come and squashed me like a bug, but he waited patiently for me to build up a nice nuclear arsenal... LOL

 

[Thormodr]

I am sure that's a bug somehow. The game was rushed out and the quality assurance testing just wasn't there.

The AI does seem to have ramped up the cheating quite a bit in ciV though. Really takes away from the game.

 

[Trorbes]

Since it's pretty obvious the AI is incapable of properly managing its economy at the moment, is it any surprise they'd get a lenience on deficit?

 

[Exterminas]

I don't want to offend anyone, but that's the way most strategy games work and the way civ has always worked. Most other games don't make it that obviuous, but they don't offer that bigt variety in difficulty.

 

[hyungry]

I don't know what's going on to allow the AI to continue playing at that kind of negative cashflow, but I'll bet the economic crash has a lot more to do with spamming every building under the sun in every city than it does with military. Watching the buildings the AI constructs, it's pretty clear that it has no sense of which buildings are valuable and which aren't, or of city specialization.

That's usually not the case, though. The only time you see AI construct buildings is when you puppet one of them, in which case it almost always starts out with monument/colosseum regardless of era indicating they built very little or none at all. They're definitely losing gpt on either units or something else. Trade agreements with other AI civs perhaps? Display error maybe?

 

[Clement]

I have the same problem, i made a thread about it just now but i missed this thread, i should have posted it here.

In my game Hiawatha has an entire continent, he has zero gold and -91 gold every turn yet his empire is not falling apart, and i struggle along with my 4 cities, i thought Prince difficulty was the one where player and AI played on a level footing?

 

[cr0ws]

I assume at immortal difficulty you have to be...immortal...which I doubt you are btw.....so level back down, hero.

 

[Silvis]

Is it possible that the deficit for them is removed at certain difficulties?

 

[Jaca]

Is it possible that the deficit for them is removed at certain difficulties?

Who knows?! I doubt it. I played a Kings Game (went for culture with my 5 cities but won a space race because for some reason the AI did threathen me but never attacked, nor did he build more then a single booster of his space ship.) and Hiawatha was running a large empire (15+ cities, through warring, of course) at -958gpt for several turns with his treasury at dead zero. Occasionally he ran at +1,200gpt or so, probably when having another of those several turns of golden ages. Also, despite the 15+ cities and still a hapiness of 187 !! I wouldn't be surprised he got multiple golden ages this way, which can be a nice way of keeping your economics more then afloat. Go for the Patrongae Tree, ally two ro three city states and spend the gifted great people, except great scientists, at golden ages. Not sure but I thought this might be the way the AI works.

JanCar

 

[dannythefool]

There is definitely something wrong with the AI cashflow. On Prince, King, Emperor all civs go bankrupt around turn 250.

They don't always do that for me. In my current game, the two remaining AIs have tons of gold on turn 264. (But they have almost no military...)