Ai blatantly cheat on Prince difficulty?????

[Traks]

In this analogy I would say it is even not dribbling, but keeping ball in his hands all the time. Still missing the basket though.
And it is not because AI wants to cheat that way, but because nobody taught him how to dribble.

I am fine if AI cheats a little keeping armies but losing science.
I am not so fine if AI keeps army AND science.
It should be fixed on AI level, that AI would properly balance their economy.

Just theoretical ideas, when finish 3rd game, it is going to shelf till expansion or major patches as game does offer challenges only giving huge bonuses to AI.

 

[KAuss]

That still does not answer the question... Does it matter? It's trivial if he was dribbling at all if he can't score... The game of basketball is not won on how many ankles you can break... Nor is Civ V based on how much gold you can accumulate...

Dribbling helps you to get open for better shots in basketball, the more potent your dribbling skills are, the more open you should get...

Economy in Civ V is to help you field a better army to have better tactical advantage at war... However, if you can't shoot the ball, or if you rather run an archer into a longsword, then all the money or dribbling skills in the world will not win you either game...

So is it really a cheat? ONLY if they can shoot, or fight...

 

[ashmizen]

I think the key here is that the OP misunderstands how income works in this game.

In Civ IV, if you went into negative income, then your units start to disband.

In Civ V, that is not how it works. If you go into negative income, then that number is deducted from your research. No matter how low you go, you units will not disband, your research will simply go to 0. This is straight from the manual.

In your case, the AI has already reached the end of the tech tree. It has no need to tech any further (increasing score is pointless for the AI), and so it may have gone into negative income on purpose. In any case, the AI tends to go into negative income rather easily on low difficulty settings (king or below). This is due to them not being able to determine the exact number of military, workers, and buildings that they need, and they overbuild to compensate. This also greatly hurts them - The AI's I've seen with -100 income or more tend to have spearmen for the entire game, even when myself and a few other AI are in the modern age.

 

[Collic]

1) Nobody has ever beaten Prince.

I've beaten prince, and i only started playing civ iv a few months back before v's release ( I was playing on warlord btw). It's a fairly balanced difficulty level. I'm not sure what you're smoking, but can I have some?

 

[KAuss]

Did you use a cheat?

 

[Lebowski89]

I seriously do not know how people have problems with economy or unit upkeep... this game at this point of time rewards those that build trading posts in every single tile around a city.

I have had massive armies and have gotten to a point where I was getting 500gold a turn when in gold age.

 

[Lebowski89]

I've beaten prince, and i only started playing civ iv a few months back before v's release ( I was playing on warlord btw). It's a fairly balanced difficulty level. I'm not sure what you're smoking, but can I have some?

I think his post was sarcasm, cause Prince is an easy difficult level. I play games where the only way to win is through domination so I need a big army, like the OP can't seem to acquire or sustain.

 

[Collic]

What about trading revenue and gold cities built riverside? Both of those things seem to net a lot of cash for me. I think the way to approach it is probably doing your very upmost to beeline for the important unhappiness reduction and or upkeep cost social policies.

Piety seems pretty good for large empires, then theres the order tree and a few wonders. It seems a better bet than rationalism to me, since teching gets so ridiculously fast late game anyway. I can't claim to know how easy it is to do this on higher difficulties, but it seems to me the barrier to having a large army is the size of your empire since that has a large impact on your income.

The one thing i'm not really liking about v are the slow build times - i may look to see if modding can help there.

 

[Traks]

Ohhh, one mroe thing to add.
Building worker (cheapest unit) and then disbanding nets you 30 gold for 105 hammers, what is around 1:3 conversion rate. Much better than 1:10 rate offered, but gives you lots of crappy micromanagement. So another way to make up for money shortage. If you want less pointless management, just install mod which returns normal exchange rates.

But small cities with only cottages now win over anything.

 

[russelcoight]

I seriously do not know how people have problems with economy or unit upkeep... this game at this point of time rewards those that build trading posts in every single tile around a city.

I have had massive armies and have gotten to a point where I was getting 500gold a turn when in gold age.

And so am i. I cannot stress this enough guys , NO im not whining that the AI is impossible and ultra hard blah blah. They are dumb as a door knob... BUT that's the problem. DUMB ai + Blatant cheating is the same crappy ai as civ 3. PLEASE read this and stop missing this very key point.

I think the key here is that the OP misunderstands how income works in this game.

In Civ IV, if you went into negative income, then your units start to disband.

In Civ V, that is not how it works. If you go into negative income, then that number is deducted from your research. No matter how low you go, you units will not disband, your research will simply go to 0. This is straight from the manual.

In your case, the AI has already reached the end of the tech tree. It has no need to tech any further (increasing score is pointless for the AI), and so it may have gone into negative income on purpose. In any case, the AI tends to go into negative income rather easily on low difficulty settings (king or below). This is due to them not being able to determine the exact number of military, workers, and buildings that they need, and they overbuild to compensate. This also greatly hurts them - The AI's I've seen with -100 income or more tend to have spearmen for the entire game, even when myself and a few other AI are in the modern age.

I am pretty sure you are wrong here. Ive ran into -5gpt with zero treasury and i lost units every turn.



So yeah seriously guys i didn't think my post was that hard to understand. I know fan bois will read anything as pure slader , QQ and completely unjustified nonsense. But basically despite the fact every civ AI has cheated , civ 4 ai was smarter and didn't cheat as bad as this on "Prince" or as it was "Noble".

 

[DioAurion]

Sounds like we need someone who downloaded world builder to quickly settle this debate.


Go go someone. I'm working.

 

[Dandenoth]

I think the reason the AI has such a good GPT output is because, at least in my experience, they seem to spam trading posts on everything they own.

 

[SuperJay]

1) Nobody has ever beaten Prince.

2) If your opponent has 213942934923 wonders, they are likely in the lead. You need to start spamming settlers - the kind of settlers that makes America's manifest destiny look like China's lucky cat. y

3) Secondly, the whole 'bound by your economy' thing is obviously a bug. Surely your economy shouldn't be a bottleneck. That's both unrealistic and totally unfun. The only bottleneck should be your 'will to experience life to its fullest'. Obviously the programmers weren't good enough to express that.

Epic. And first post no less

 

[morss_4]

I think the key here is that the OP misunderstands how income works in this game.

In Civ IV, if you went into negative income, then your units start to disband.

In Civ V, that is not how it works. If you go into negative income, then that number is deducted from your research. No matter how low you go, you units will not disband, your research will simply go to 0. This is straight from the manual.

This is not true. If you run out of money units start disbanding. This happened to me in a game where I was going for the Bollywood achievement and gave away all my cities but the capital to reduce social policy cost. To my surprise in 10 turns my entire army disbanded, this despite the fact that I had enough beakers to cover the negative gold.

 

[nemini]

The main problem I see is that large empires are ALWAYS better than small ones. I finished two games (one on prince difficulty, one on king) each took me ~30 hours, and in the first I focused on diplomatic victory and the second on cultural victory and my empire didn't exceed 6 cities in either game, but each city had 25+ population at the end, while the only AIs' capitals were at ~10-15 population and their other cities were more like 5-10 population!

None of the AIs even considered another type of victory than domination (or those that did were quickly conquered), and so by the end of both games I had about 5 enemies left (down from 15), who each conquered at least half of their respective continent with total ease, while having enough gold and science to keep up with - and occasionally surpass - me AND have armies that could have easily wiped me out had they been smart enough to use them.

Also, even with a ton of wonders, because obviously my cities far surpassed theirs in terms of productivity, that gave me all kinds of bonuses, I was always just at the happiness barrier, barely maintaining my growth rate, even though I managed to trade for ALL available resources (15*5 happiness), had all the policies that gave me an advantage (-20% unhappiness from tile working population, -50% from unhappiness from number of cities, -33% unhappiness from tile working population in the capital)!

The only way I won was by using the grossly overpowered city-states for growth and culture and focusing on getting great merchants to get enough gold to maintain my relations with the numerous city-states!

What it comes down to is this: A cheating AI is no fun to play against, because either you quickly fall behind and are frustrated that the AI only wins by cheating, or you can keep up, then the cheats are too weak to compensate for the AI's lack of everything else and you are frustrated that you only win because the AI is too stupid to use its units! It's no fun defending against a superior army just to win because you built a citadel in that one bottleneck you deemed strategically important! Or because the AI attacks a city but does not know how to effectively protect its siege units! Or because you are on a different continent and the AI cannot grasp the concept of protecting their transport ships!

I had hoped Firaxis would finally allocate some development time for a really good AI that can outsmart the player without having to blatantly cheat to keep it from stumbling over its own feet, but apparently dumbing down the Civilization franchise for the masses and updating the graphics to look really shiny took up all the time ...

 

[GlobularFoody]

Well, I just played a Prince game remarkably similar to the OP's and it was just plain cheating by the AI. Not only did they have about 40 cities, they had researched every single tech by the year 1900! Siam had every city it conquered on puppet, I looked, and they were pumping out MODERN era units VERY quickly with cities that, from the improvements they had, had almost NO production. My size 15 unit producing city with all production buildings, etc couldn't make a modern armor unit in less than about 20 turns. They had size 20 cities close to one another with very fews farms or any food prodicing tile, and I had ALL of the maritime city-states allied with me for the food. They couldn't possibly have had the economy to support that many units, building them in such a fast way, AND the city sizes they had.

I'm giving them a month to patch this nonsense or I'm not going to play it anymore. There is simply too much wrong with this game after a few play-throughs to ignore anymore.

 

[Ahriman]

Well, I just played a Prince game remarkably similar to the OP's and it was just plain cheating by the AI.

Bwah?
Just because the AI is on Prince doesn't mean that one can't go on a rampage and conquer all its neighbors.

Not only did they have about 40 cities, they had researched every single tech by the year 1900!

These things are linked. Population - science. With 40 cities, and large population, of course they can buy a lot of stuff.

Siam had every city it conquered on puppet, I looked, and they were pumping out MODERN era units VERY quickly with cities that, from the improvements they had, had almost NO production.

So they were probably buying them with gold.

They had size 20 cities close to one another with very fews farms or any food prodicing tile

So, they had few farms, little production... sounds like they had massive numbers of trading posts, for huge gold income.

They couldn't possibly have had the economy to support that many units, building them in such a fast way, AND the city sizes they had

Sure they could.
You can, too!

If Prince is too hard for you, try one of the lower difficulty levels.

 

[gunter]

Wanna an example ?

Of , my Siam opponent has a treasure of 141 and it earns 18 per turn. This states the Diplomatic advisory.

Well, a turn later, I repeat 1 turn later it signs a research agreement with Arabia.....

How the hell is that possbile if 250 are mandatory for such a deal ?

I am sure the Prince level is plenty of AI cheats, not advantages but the AI is used to curve game rules, we can say the AI has no rules.

 

[SomethingWitty]

2K has said that one Prince level, the AI is on equal footing with the player.

If you are having more trouble at the Prince level, it is because the AI is not being handicapped like they are at settler, chieftain, and warlord. And also you're probably not a very good player. Prince? C'mon.

"Cheating" only begins at king, and gets higher from there.

Also, I'm sick of people whining about "cheating" AI. If you want a progressively harder game, use the difficulty levels. If you want truly intelligent opponents on equal footing, play multiplayer.

 

[gunter]

On Prince level the AI make research agreements with 141 gold at least

I killed around 25 units in a multi turns Frigate shore attack but my opponent with around 12 cities had in the field around 25 extra units and the production rate was around 7/8 unit per turn..... the same I killed every turn with my Frigates....

How can the AI at Prince level have this huge amount of cheating ?

I told that I won against the AI at Prince level fews times but that's frustrating the fact the AI has no rules...above all its units are free of maintenance and the unit production rate is around 12X the human one with the same amount of cities...

a shame indeed