Does AI cheat?

[Tk1]

I was playing this game where everyone started with the very first city. I cheated first, what I did was keep pressing Ctrl-W to enter the world map. The Portuguese was doing something funny, it was building a barrack this moment. Then the next moment it was building a settler. I saw its remaining turns was 4, then I hit return to proceed to the next turn and Ctrl-W to check again. Now it was 2 remaining turns! No chopping.

Does the AI cheat on Noble?

I'm restarting the game again, this is turn 1, below are screen shots

 

[ParadigmShifter]

New cities start with a certain number of hammers for the AI, on all levels.

 

[Tk1]

Well thanks! It's a comfort to know.

 

[Nikolai Dneppen]

I thoroughly convinced that the AI cheats, but I can't really prove it. I once heard somewhere that the AI has a certain number of 'hidden traits" or whatnot. I'm not sure what that means, but it's the reason I can't actually prove the cheating.

A good example: I'm researching Liberalism, and according to my espionage, I should get it. But just 1 or 2 turns from it, a random AI will take it. In a massive rage, I check the diplomacy, and the AI that got it doesn't have all the perquisites! The only explanation for this is either flat out cheating, or hidden tech advancements.

Another example is simply bad events or a horribly improbable combat loss at precisely the time it would hurt the most. Could just be me only remembering the crapiest things that happened, but I have my suspicions.

 

[Jerrymander]

I thoroughly convinced that the AI cheats, but I can't really prove it. I once heard somewhere that the AI has a certain number of 'hidden traits" or whatnot. I'm not sure what that means, but it's the reason I can't actually prove the cheating.

A good example: I'm researching Liberalism, and according to my espionage, I should get it. But just 1 or 2 turns from it, a random AI will take it. In a massive rage, I check the diplomacy, and the AI that got it doesn't have all the perquisites! The only explanation for this is either flat out cheating, or hidden tech advancements.

Another example is simply bad events or a horribly improbable combat loss at precisely the time it would hurt the most. Could just be me only remembering the crapiest things that happened, but I have my suspicions.

1. You don't need all the prerequisites to get a technology. You can get Pottery without Animal Husbandry, for example. Husbandry just makes Pottery tech faster.

2. That's not AI cheating, that's statistics. Real statistics are about as far away from cheating as one can get. Dice show no favoritism.

But the 'hidden traits' are true for diplomacy; AI civs like each other more than humans.

 

[Derakon]

Humans do tend to remember failures far more often than successes, even if the successes are more improbable. I know I've occasionally won a fight at 25% odds, but I care a lot more about the fights I lose at 75% odds*.

That said, the AI does have a number of handicap benefits simply based on the nominal difficulty level they play at. Full information here (no idea how up-to-date that is). Among other things -- and keep in mind, this is assuming you're playing a difficulty above Noble:

* They pay less for research, units, city maintenance, etc.
* They get better starting sites compared to the humans' sites.
* They have a built-in diplomacy penalty towards humans.
* They'll refuse to trade techs with humans as often (without changing how readily they'll trade techs with other AIs)
* Their cities grow faster.
* Their unit upgrade costs are lower.

And so on. There are also some AI-only benefits -- for example, their unit sight range is boosted by their movement range, to help make up for the fact that they don't remember where they've last seen units. I don't know what all of those modifiers are.

* Strictly speaking I probably shouldn't have started either of those fights...but enh, the unit was disposable.

 

[ParadigmShifter]

I thought the starting site was depending on difficulty.. so at settler the human gets the best start whilst at deity they get the worst?

 

[Derakon]

ParadigmShifter: so, functionally, if you are at a difficulty higher than Noble, you should get worse starting sites than the AI does.

Basically, any situation in which you can say that the player is penalized for playing on a high difficulty can be reworded to say that the AI is given a benefit when the player is on a high difficulty. Well, barring multiplayer, anyway.

 

[Cicerosaurus]

Okay a query with the starting site. Assuming the human gets a worse position to start with than the AI, wouldn't that only be effective until you find a decent spot for your subsequent cities? Or does the human get worse countryside?

 

[Derakon]

Given the number of times I've seen "I had a good starting site, but I was stuck against the tundra / between two AIs / on a tiny island / etc." I suspect the game just looks at the capital's BFC and otherwise just tries to start each civ as far away from the other civs as possible. But I honestly have nothing beyond anecdotes to back that up.

 

[Bushface]

Sometimes it seems that there are hidden code fragments starting "If player is human then . . ." and continuing :-
". . . locate start in worst possible location"
". . . ensure start location has no access to resources needed for his UU or UB, preferably both"
". . . in combat use specially-biased RNG ensuring loss or very severe damage"
". . . construct Wonder one turn earlier than human"
". . . assign human disatrous Event"
And so on. In fact, the game's RNG shows no anti-human bias, it just seems that way.

 

[Nick Carpathia]

I don't think there's that much of a start bias, I've seen the AIs on peninsulas blocked off by deserts and tundra, hills sheep, that sort of thing. It's just a cognitive bias that whine about our own starts and not about that of the non-sentient computer script.

 

[obsolete]

If being psychic counts as cheating, then you betcha...

AI knows when ever you bribe a unit to war against it, it knows when you made a tech trade 5000 years before it even met you, and it doesn't suffer FoW like the human has to. And that's just the tip of the iceburge...

 

[Nick Carpathia]

It's sorta weird, the AI is only allowed to do certain things when it's 'aware' of certain map tiles. For instance, they won't settle specifically for copper without bronzeworking, and they will pay hard currency for your maps to defog tiles, but their 4-move frigates will relentlessly hunt your 5-move circumnav-boosted privateers even if you move out of their vision.

 

[mechaerik]

Technically, its not out of their vision range- unlike humans, who have a range of 1, the AI has a range equal to their movement, IIRC.

This is because the AI does not have a memory.

 

[Charlesbusa]

I'm conviced that the AI gets a combat bonus that isn't reflected in the combat odds.

I got tired of it last night and saved, fought, lost, reload, fought, lost, reload, etc... On 67% combat odds, I lost 13 times before I finally won. That's 7% combat odds, mine and the AI's were both knights. It was ridiculous.

 

[mechaerik]

It does not.

 

[Jerrymander]

I'm conviced that the AI gets a combat bonus that isn't reflected in the combat odds.

I got tired of it last night and saved, fought, lost, reload, fought, lost, reload, etc... On 67% combat odds, I lost 13 times before I finally won. That's 7% combat odds, mine and the AI's were both knights. It was ridiculous.

So you lost 13 times in a row with a 33% chance to lose? Aside from not having Random Seed on Reload enabled (which would mean that the outcome of the battle does not change by reloading) you had a 0.000018% chance of losing 13 times in a row.

God hates you.

 

[goodolarchie]

So you lost 13 times in a row with a 33% chance to lose? Aside from not having Random Seed on Reload enabled (which would mean that the outcome of the battle does not change by reloading) you had a 0.000018% chance of losing 13 times in a row.

God hates you.

Hah, this is just what I was thinking. I think you didn't have random seed enabled and one turn you just did something differently? If you honestly had it on, stay the hell away from a casino for the rest of your life.

 

[Earthling]

Basically, any situation in which you can say that the player is penalized for playing on a high difficulty can be reworded to say that the AI is given a benefit when the player is on a high difficulty.

No, that's frustratingly not true at all. I wish it was, but a lot of things about the game still change to the player's disadvantage. If you were isolated with no AI interaction you'd still play a very different game dependent on difficulty.

Barbarians I think are fair and something you take for granted if you go up in difficulty, same with goodie huts, so I'm not just arguing you can get better goody hut results or something, that one is ok and very transparent to players, but also, just what I recall right now:

-Costs of technologies change
-Maintenance and upkeep calculations change
-Before BtS patch changed it (which was very good, imo) your happiness and health caps would change.

I would probably have liked to see all these things set at a specific level for the player, and not change from Noble on up. It really does lead to adverse effects on playstyle or just having fun though, because you literally can't use the same strategies even with all other things equal. And when you combine a couple other factors...Huge + Deity results in much higher tech costs in the ancient era than Standard + Noble, even though you'll still only have your initial starting city, so it takes longer to get all your basic techs and so on. (likewise I think they should have scaled things on mapsizes better. Huge and Standard shouldn't differ at the beginning of the game/ancient and classical eras, they should have introduced gradiated changes. Obviously the idea is that techs have to cost more, upkeep is less immediate etc... on Huge for instance but they didn't scale it very well)