One feature that I like about Civilisation is the AI, which seems to know the situation pretty well. For example, I stack a lot of units in a border city, and the AI will bypass that city and try to attack other weaker cities. The question is how does the AI know? Did the AI cheat? There are many situations where I think the AI cheated, like I was on an island and the AI decided to land next to my worst defended cities. Don't tell me that the AI decided to investigate all my cities to know where to land.
Did the AI cheat?
- Thread starter LordBevan
- Start date
Say it with me:
The AI Does Not Cheat. Period.
The AI has several programmed advantages that are readily apparent to the human player. The AI knows where your troops are. I had a Conqusitidor come out of nowhere once and snag a worker that was six tiles deep in my territory. The AI must have cheated, right? Wrong. The AI knew where my worker was before hand. It was programmed to know, not suddenly decide to check where all the human player's units were.
The AI knows where the resources are at the beginning of the game. If you see a city with no apparnet rhyme or reason for being there, likely there will be a resource there later in the game. You can test this by building your own world in the editor and turning debug mode on, and watching where the AI tries to settle.
Sorry for coming off so strong, but "The AI Cheats" is so done to death here. It has been proven, and not by Firaxis, that they AI doesn't cheat. Yes, they do have programmed advantages, but these are known, and can be used against the AI.
The AI Does Not Cheat. Period.
The AI has several programmed advantages that are readily apparent to the human player. The AI knows where your troops are. I had a Conqusitidor come out of nowhere once and snag a worker that was six tiles deep in my territory. The AI must have cheated, right? Wrong. The AI knew where my worker was before hand. It was programmed to know, not suddenly decide to check where all the human player's units were.
The AI knows where the resources are at the beginning of the game. If you see a city with no apparnet rhyme or reason for being there, likely there will be a resource there later in the game. You can test this by building your own world in the editor and turning debug mode on, and watching where the AI tries to settle.
Sorry for coming off so strong, but "The AI Cheats" is so done to death here. It has been proven, and not by Firaxis, that they AI doesn't cheat. Yes, they do have programmed advantages, but these are known, and can be used against the AI.
morchuflex
Emperor
BTW, I know this is a long and old discussion, but could anyone explain to me why it is so hard to program an efficient AI that developpers have to resort to "programmed advantages"? I know little about computers. But from a naive point of vue, it doesn't seem so difficult to program a computer to play Civ at least decently. After all, computers can play chess, bridge and many other difficult games while giving humans a good challenge.
warpstorm
Yumbo? Yumbo!
One big difference is that chess and bridge for example are relatively simple games (compared to the complexity of Civ). Another is that those games have centuries of human knowledge on how to play well. In the case of Civ3, Soren had to write the AI while the rules of the game were still in flux. There were no experts at the time to draw from. In general, game AI is one of the toughest areas of game development to do well.
And keep in mind too, outside of the civ fanatics community (and I mean fanatics in general, not this site) the AI is regarded as one of the best AIs in the industry.
