AI Cheats

[Darkpriest667]

i respect you paradigm.. you gave me some damned good advice about winning on prince.. but im sorry when it comes to combat odds.. ive lost enough superior units to warriors and axemen that i will never give up my belief the AI cheats... ive got 3 witnesses in a game where asoka's single knight with no defensive bonuses wiped 3 tanks out... that were full strength with 10 and20% strength bonuses... im sorry thats cheating... 99.9% is accurate against a human opponent against the ai that odd count is worthless in my eyes..


which is why i said in another thread that i dont even attack unless i have 7 to 1 odds..

1st, are you a programmer?

2nd, Asoka probably upgraded his airships to fighters.

3rd, if you fight 1000 99.9% battles, you will lose one 99.9% battle and you'll remember that one lost battle.

i dont think he had airships... however i didnt take this into account... Where did he get the money for the upgrades he spent his 1200 gold when i sold him flight

1st, are you a programmer?

2nd, Asoka probably upgraded his airships to fighters.

3rd, if you fight 1000 99.9% battles, you will lose one 99.9% battle and you'll remember that one lost battle.

i dont think he had airships... however i didnt take this into account... Where did he get the money for the upgrades he spent his 1200 gold when i sold him flight

 

[blitzkrieg1980]

i respect you paradigm.. you gave me some damned good advice about winning on prince.. but im sorry when it comes to combat odds.. ive lost enough superior units to warriors and axemen that i will never give up my belief the AI cheats... ive got 3 witnesses in a game where asoka's single knight with no defensive bonuses wiped 3 tanks out... that were full strength with 10 and20% strength bonuses... im sorry thats cheating... 99.9% is accurate against a human opponent against the ai that odd count is worthless in my eyes..


which is why i said in another thread that i dont even attack unless i have 7 to 1 odds..

Look, bro, I've seen 3 warriors take a hilled city with 2 fortified warrior defenders. That was me who took their city. I won that battle. The odds were drastically in the AI's favor. I attacked with 5 units and 4 units remained. I've tried to suicide a horse archer at a rifleman and had it survive. I've seen a heavily damaged tank attack an infantry and win... crap happens. The human mind remembers the crap happening against them, not for them.

 

[ParadigmShifter]

I beat a spearman in a forest with a flanking I chariot today (1.7% odds).

 

[blitzkrieg1980]

Exactly, ParadigmShifter. It goes both ways. But since the AI doesn't care (since it isn't human) it doesn't remember it's humiliating losses, but we sure as hell do.

BTW, ParadigmShifter, what company do you work for?

 

[ParadigmShifter]

No-one big It's in Liverpool but it's not Sony Europe.

EDIT: Woohoo I made it into someones sig

 

[blitzkrieg1980]

LoL. I made the "Trenchtown Rock" quote my signature in a political forum a while ago. I shoulda always had it in my siggy here (being a musician i should advertise that getting hit with music is painless! Unless it's me trying to sing lol)

 

[ParadigmShifter]

It is the same sig I had on gamedev.net (don't post there very often now, haven't done so for about a year).

But they allow more characters in the user name so I have a space in mine there.

 

[Willem]

i dont think he had airships... however i didnt take this into account... Where did he get the money for the upgrades he spent his 1200 gold when i sold him flight

If he had Physics, he'd have Airships. The AI loves spamming those things. And just because he gave you 1200 gold doesn't mean that was all that he had. The number that appears in the trade screen is only what he's willing to give you, not his total amount. He also gets a 50% discount for upgrading units so it wouldn't have cost him that much to upgrade his Airships. I believe that step-up is a fairly cheap one. I don't build Airships myself so I'm not positive though.

 

[Woody1]

ive lost enough superior units to warriors and axemen that i will never give up my belief the AI cheats... ive got 3 witnesses in a game where asoka's single knight with no defensive bonuses wiped 3 tanks out... that were full strength with 10 and20% strength bonuses... im sorry thats cheating... 99.9% is accurate against a human opponent against the ai that odd count is worthless in my eyes..

You're wrong. This kind of stuff has been discussed for years, and nobody has ever proven the AI cheats at combat. Everyone knows you're wrong. And it's okay to be wrong. But what's sad is that you will refuse to admit you are wrong. And that means you'll never learn.

 

[r_rolo1]

i respect you paradigm.. you gave me some damned good advice about winning on prince.. but im sorry when it comes to combat odds.. ive lost enough superior units to warriors and axemen that i will never give up my belief the AI cheats... ive got 3 witnesses in a game where asoka's single knight with no defensive bonuses wiped 3 tanks out... that were full strength with 10 and20% strength bonuses... im sorry thats cheating... 99.9% is accurate against a human opponent against the ai that odd count is worthless in my eyes..

And my unpromoted warrior already defeated a Aryan uprise of 4 barb archers in Monarch.....

So, the RNG is biased against who?....

 

[PieceOfMind]

for all you wanna be programmers out there... Who probably think you know enough about code to say that and i quote "if the AI did cheat the code wouldnt fit on 3 disks"


you are full of crap... 3 of my buddies and i play on a consistent basis.. one thing we noticed is... combat odds dont mean squat when you attack the AI..

Ive attacked AI warriors in a desert with INFANTRY and lost. 99.9% that would be a 1 in 1000 chance of the warrior winning... its happened enough that i dont even look at the odds anymore.

Case in point... During our last MP game David and conway were in a 3 way war with me and my vassal Asoka... Even though Asoka only had longbowmen and knights.. his knights were kicking the crap out of tanks... now folks.. come on .. a 28 strength unit with 10% and 20% strength bonuses versus a knight that gets no defensive bonuses... and 1 knight actually managed to kill 3 tanks... this is not only ridiculous it shows me the AI cheats.

another case in point in the same game... I gave Asoka flight because david and conway decided to start bombing my cities and my garrison of 2 fighters in each city wasnt cutting it.. now asoka has emancipation frees speech etc... he doesnt even have the nationalism technology (why because i didnt give it to him) the VERY NEXT turn asoka has 3 fighters in every city... now he only has 10 cities.. and he has just increased his fighter count from 0 to 30.... how are you programming geniuses gonna explain to me and others that the AI isnt a cheating bastard when they win on combat odds of .01% in their favor and they spam units like no other... keep in mind we were playing on noble level.. so there is no way there was an automatic bonus for the AI.. they cheat enough we dont need to be giving them free bonuses too.

Moderator Action: Don't flame other posters
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

It sounds like you are not aware that Noble is not a completely equal game between AIs and human players. The AIs even at Noble get significant discounts on upgrade costs. I think this was mentioned earlier in the thread but I'm not sure if you saw it. 1200 gold would upgrade a massive army for the AI but only a very small army for the human player. You will probably call this cheating but it's more appropriately described as a handicap which is necessary for the AI to be competent.

Now, as for combat odds, you are making some outrageous claims without even the slightest hint of hard evidence. Don't just be all talk - show us a gamesave if you are so confident.

Maybe there is a virus on your computer that messes with the code in your games and some nerd on the other side of the world is chuckling that he's caused you so much grief.

But seriously, I'm in a better position than many to say I am 100% certain there is no cheating going on in combat odds. I've seen all the relevant code and have even written an odds calculator completely independent of the game's calculator and so far it has only confirmed the accuracy of both.

There are in fact two ways the odds calculator can be innaccurate. At Prince difficulty and below you get allocated a small number of "free barbarian wins". If you are attacked by a barb or you attack a barb while you still have these free wins left then the odds calculator actually lies to you by under-estimating your odds. It might tell you your warrior only has 0.2% chance of killing that barb axeman on the forest but in reality you probably have 90% odds.

The other way the odds calculator can be innacurate is a very rare situation with siege units attacking. When the siege unit can damage the unit down to exactly the combat limit there is a slight mismatch between the odds calculator and the actual way combat works that results in over-estimating the odds of the siege unit withdrawing (surviving). But this is fairly rair, it only affects siege units, and I'd be very surprised if you were basing your entire judgement on this because the odds are typically not off by more than a few percent and at most maybe 20%.

By the way, you are welcome to check the mod in my sig, and if you can be bothered looking at the source code for that you will see explicitly how odds are worked out. If you are prepared to challenge all of us and claim the AI cheats then at least do us a favour and provide some slither of evidence (a gamesave please). If your beliefs are so dogmatic and you believe the whole world is against you it might be better off to cower in a cosy little hole where RNGs and people with strong arguments can't get to you.

 

[ParadigmShifter]

Incidentally, does civ use the C rand() function or the Python Mersenne Twister variant?

 

[mechaerik]

I won a .4% odds battle once. I had consigned that unit to an early grave, but he survived and gained a -load of xp. I think it was a severely wounded vulture against some other unit, but i forget. I also had a game where a stack of 3 axes took a city with 5 fortified, veteran protective archers in a city on a hill. I cheered that win, as i was just suiciding my last troops before my reinforcements got there. (I don't know why, but i suicide my troops alot. I'm Zapp Branigan.)

 

[Darkpriest667]

noble isnt even with human huh.. well according to the book that comes with civ 4 civ 4 warlords and civ 4 bts.. i t says noble is the level where you get no advantages and neither does the computer.. if its changed in one of the patches then it wasnt logged


and i will be checking out your link.. Ive been coding c++ for 15 years and it would take a lot of code for AI cheat to fill up more than 3 DVD roms worth of data.. sorry but thats true... believe it or not ....

i look forward to reading the code.

 

[ParadigmShifter]

and i will be checking out your link.. Ive been coding c++ for 15 years and it would take a lot of code for AI cheat to fill up more than 3 DVD roms worth of data.. sorry but thats true... believe it or not ....

i look forward to reading the code.

I already agreed with you on that Don't tell LemonMerchant that tho

 

[PieceOfMind]

noble isnt even with human huh.. well according to the book that comes with civ 4 civ 4 warlords and civ 4 bts.. i t says noble is the level where you get no advantages and neither does the computer.. if its changed in one of the patches then it wasnt logged

The manual is incorrect on many things. Many parts of the game documenation (including the civilopedia) gloss over many details and give wrong ideas. The bonuses the AI gets at Noble have been there since the release of vanilla. The bonuses would have been adjusted along the line towards BtS 3.17, possibly several times, but it's still the same idea.

I agree the game's documenation is very poor, particularly compared to the previous civ games which had excellent, detailed manuals.

and i will be checking out your link.. Ive been coding c++ for 15 years and it would take a lot of code for AI cheat to fill up more than 3 DVD roms worth of data.. sorry but thats true... believe it or not ....

i look forward to reading the code.

I don't know what you mean by looking for cheating code to fill up 3 DVD ROMs (by the way the game is 1DVD or 3CDs I think). That was a comment by another poster (to which I wish to make no comment ) and has nothing to do with the odds calculator I'm directing you to.

If you would like to check the way the combat is actually resolved (i.e. how combat works), then you can see yourself if you open the file CvUnit.cpp and find the function resolveCombat.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

for all you wanna be programmers out there... Who probably think you know enough about code to say that and i quote "if the AI did cheat the code wouldnt fit on 3 disks"

If you are going to quote me for the purpose of making disparaging comments about others, I would appreciate it if you would get the quote right, or quote the actual words I said, like this:

Lemon Merchant: If it could (well enough to be consistent and get away with it), the code size of the game would not fit on the three CDs the game ships with.

I went on to imply that I don't know much about programming, which is completely true. I was using sarcasm, and a slight exaggeration to make a point. If I gave anyone the impression that I actually know how to write code, then I'm sorry, that wasn't my intention.

The point I was trying to respectfully make was that as human beings, our perceptions are colored by what we experience. I think I said it well enough in my OP, so I won't go on about it. The reason I even posted was because once again, we are entertained by yet another person moaning about how the AI cheats. There have been many threads and a lot of discussion about this. Respected members of CFC, some of whom are modders and long time players, have weighed in on this issue. It's been pretty well beaten to death that the AI isn't able to cheat because it's just not programmed that way. We think we see the AI cheating because it's the nature of the human mind to remember negative things more often and make a false assumption of the frequency of these events. We all do it every day. It's just the way we're programmed.

So, just FYI, I have not looked at any Civ related code, nor the SDK, nor any of the python, or XML. I'll leave that to the experts, thank you. I'll also reiterate that I know very little about actual computer programming, but I didn't claim to be an expert in my OP anyway. (Sorry Paradigm and Piece of Mind, I didn't mean to invade your turf. ) But I still know that the AI doesn't cheat. You don't need to write software for 15 years to figure that out, you just need to listen to the people who already have.

 

[King Jason]

you are full of crap... 3 of my buddies and i play on a consistent basis.. one thing we noticed is... combat odds dont mean squat when you attack the AI..

Ive attacked AI warriors in a desert with INFANTRY and lost. 99.9% that would be a 1 in 1000 chance of the warrior winning... its happened enough that i dont even look at the odds anymore.

Sounds to me like it's working alright and you're just getting bad luck. 99.9% chance to win leaves a .1% chance to lose every time. Even if you lost with those odds 10 times in a row, it isn't cheating, it's just bad luck.

Everyone else has come back here with just as crazy odds in favor of the player instead of the A.I.

The RNG isn't biased. It's random.

 

[Ai Shizuka]

This thread reminds me of all the online poker amateurs: "OMG this site is rigged, 4 bad beats in a row". But then when they pull off random bs like gutshot draws and the likes it's alright. That's skill.

We, as humans, are "coded" to remember bad things and take good things for granted. Esp. when said bad things cost you money.
Losing your first 3 warriors at >80% odds vs animals can easily screw up a game for good. It doesn't matter if you win the following 40 fights, evening out the odds. The game is screwed and you think it's cheating.

 

[PieceOfMind]

I'm just thinking...

You know what would be really awesome? I don't know if many of you have heard about true random number generators, but it would be awesome if the game could call one of these rather than the game's PRNG (written by Soren I assume since the function is named after him ).

A true random number generator relies on a real-world source of randomness like atmospheric radio noise (lol unless aliens are sending us messages) to generate a random number. The problem is they are a lot slower and the suggestion of putting them in a game where it would not make much difference to most would sound absurd.

Still, it'd be funny and there'd be no way to complain of any bias.