AI Gravitation

[Afforess]

I'm curious if this is beginning to happen in BBAI, because it's recently happened in my mod. The AI has gotten to a point where it is better than most humans, and it is having an interesting effect. In particular, one civilization will begin leading the pack, and become 2-5x more powerful than the other players (including the human). I suspect this is merely an unwritten feature of civilization, one civilization (or more, depending on map size) will begin winning in a runaway victory, far ahead of the others. In old games, before anybody had a decent AI, this happened as well, but the runaway player was always the human. Now, with the AI (at least in my mod) being an unstoppable force on higher difficulties, it quickly establishes itself as a dominator, crushing all other players.


Of course, this behavior could simply be unique to my mod, and a result of my unique Ruthless AI changes, which is why I'm asking this forum if they have ever seen runaway AI behavior like this. When the AI starts winning, is it several AI close together, or usually one dominate player?

 

[r_rolo1]

Well, as you said, the issue is that most players are used to play in levels where there is a fair certain that they will pwn the AI, making that the chances of seeing a AI pwn other AI far smaller ... My experience with isolated starts ( where humans only affect the issues in the other side of the ocean in a indirect way before Optics ), especially when there is only a landmass outside of where the human is ( making that all the AI are in a quasi-pangea enviroment ) shows a lot of times a AI dominating the continent in the fashion you describe ( especially AI like Shaka, Charlie, Sury, Gilgamesh, Ragnar and Hannibal ( the last two not so frequently as the others ...) ). OFC that using the ruthless AI setting, that makes all the AI more prone to landgrabbing from the neighbours and somehow more effective doing that, exarcebates things, but it is not a behaviour out of the vanilla BtS experience.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Rolo has said it pretty accurately. The better the AI, higher the difficulty, and less balanced the start, the more likely you get a super AI that is hard or impossible to stop.

It gets really, really bad on deity sometimes even in basic BTS. Fusion at 1715 AD with another AI (possibly a vassal) 20 turns from culture...that sort of thing.

 

[davidlallen]

I have seen a similar effect due to a bug. I tried to use some existing python code for making unit upgrades cheaper, but for the AI, it wound up giving like a 95% discount. I had put this into one civ's UB, and that civ wound up super-strong most of the time.

Can you follow the AI's game and make sure that it is not getting strong due to a similar kind of bug?

 

[Afforess]

Can you follow the AI's game and make sure that it is not getting strong due to a similar kind of bug?

No, it's not from any bug or new handicap in favor of AI's.

Anyway, it makes sense. Theoretically, the AI should be able to beat the human 100% of the time because it can make more calculations than a human can.

 

[DaveMcW]

Theoretically, the AI should be able to beat the human 100% of the time because it can make more calculations than a human can.

Theoretically, the AI should be able to beat the human 100% of the time because it gets handicap bonuses.

 

[phungus420]

Theoretically, the AI should be able to beat the human 100% of the time because it can make more calculations than a human can.

The human brain is a computer which is drastically more powerfull then a desktop PC, on the level of multiple orders of magnitude more powerfull. In fact a top of the line PC has about the same processing power as a cockroach brain; your statement is utterly false. The only thing a desktop computer can do faster then a human mind is raw arithmetic calculations.

 

[Killtech]

well a CPU is a processes data linearly while a brains works very parallel. and a brain is more similar to RAM module with arithmetic functions than a processor.

experience = memory =|= calculation

they are just hardly comparable different approaches to the same problem.


on topic: the larger the empire the less problems it has and the easier it becomes to become even stronger. this affects AI and players the same. the runaway effect is typical for all games that do not have suffice penalty for controlling large area & resources. thus it occurs nearly in every strategy game.

 

[Yesod]

I've been noticing the runaway AI's. I just moved up to immortal so I assumed that was the cause. But just last game I watched Napoleon chain capitulate a handful of players. The fact that it actually can capture cites at a decent rate blows everything out of the water. He did something like 4 cities in 10 turns.

Now every game I play leads to me trying to take out the group leader with his 5 vassals. It's realistic enough given that if I was in the AI's position, I would have done the exact same thing. When you add in the fact that the AIs trade and gift each other technology it leads to some real bullsh!t, though.