How can AI upgrade so easily while it has always no money?

Murky said:
There's lots of ways the AI could get upgrade cast. They could do a merchant bomb, run at 0% science, sell a tech for cash or extort funds from a weaker AI. They also get a lot of bonuses on the higher levels.
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You are meaning that the AI ALWAYS find those ways out? I wish I am an AI...
 
well i'm no AI but I usually extort about 6000 Gold per game to weaker civs...running no science for a turn can get you about 800 gold...i can do that too. but I usually use my merchant to finance tech to 100% for the rest of a game
 
Murky said:
There's lots of ways the AI could get upgrade cast. They could do a merchant bomb, run at 0% science, sell a tech for cash or extort funds from a weaker AI. They also get a lot of bonuses on the higher levels.
Click to expand...

Yes, 0% science would do it fairly quickly in many instances.
 
NKVD said:
well i'm no AI but I usually extort about 6000 Gold per game to weaker civs...running no science for a turn can get you about 800 gold...i can do that too. but I usually use my merchant to finance tech to 100% for the rest of a game
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How do you explain that if I do that with repetition, I will be far behind the AI in Science? The AI can't simply lower its science rate 10 times a game during 10 turns each without suffering of it. And it never suffers of it.

Plus, I can testimony, the upgrade can happen immediately after the tech is got, will you say that the AI was only anticipating?

I suspect the AI programmation to be a load of garbage.

And the problem is not how it could do this or that technically, but how it could do that, AT THE END.

This is a sum, not penny-pitching, trust others people judgement for a time and stop to be disrespectful.

I play on Monarch and while the other difficulty levels are too easy, I think this one shows weird differencies that make it much more difficult than it should be.

At the end, I am just curious to know how the AI is programmed. If any Firaxis programmer to read this, I would appreciate a lot to enlight me about this.
 
I am also playing on monarch and sometimes I wonder how AI manage to research and expand so quickly. Especially financial civs are very challenging to beat. How much bonuses they actually get on monarch? I wish that difficulty levels only increase the AI behaviour not to get more and more bonuses like in Civ3. This is annoying...
 
Simple answer to a good question - if the AI always upgrades BUT never has much Gold then maybe it ran out of Gold BECAUSE it always upgrades. :p

Anyway, at least the AI wants to get its units upgraded, in Civ 3 it's way too common to encounter a city in the modern age that has spearman and pikeman defenders.
 
I play on Noble (because i dont think i will ever play a game where i give an advantage to anyone. I love it to be fair) but i am too amaze at how the AI expand so quick and yet tech very fast. On noble if I keep founding the same number of cities as the AI i'll have to run my science at 20%. 10% if I would have the same number of units. what i'm guessing is that they exchange all their tech at a very very low cost...how they do it before the tech trading tech is reached, I have no idea.

I'm in awe of Mansa right now...he was teching as fast as me in my last game but could bring 3000 gold in 4-5 turns. Once I had riflemen before him I brought them on his border then the turn I was launching my attack he upgraded all his units to the riflemen...
 
NKVD said:
I play on Noble (because i dont think i will ever play a game where i give an advantage to anyone. I love it to be fair) but i am too amaze at how the AI expand so quick and yet tech very fast. On noble if I keep founding the same number of cities as the AI i'll have to run my science at 20%. 10% if I would have the same number of units. what i'm guessing is that they exchange all their tech at a very very low cost...how they do it before the tech trading tech is reached, I have no idea.

I'm in awe of Mansa right now...he was teching as fast as me in my last game but could bring 3000 gold in 4-5 turns. Once I had riflemen before him I brought them on his border then the turn I was launching my attack he upgraded all his units to the riflemen...
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The AI tends to build lots of farms and uses a specialist economy to boost their tech rate. They also do a better job of it since the warlords patch.

Mansa is a financial leader and a good tech-trader so he often gets ahead in the tech race.
 
LOL, I find it funny how some players can find all sort of pretext in order to justify what is actually not, like the AI using money to upgrade...

No, I say that because I was soon playing a game, and the AI began over his upgrade trick, and it made me think about this thread...

The AI had 220 gold the turn it upgraded. I can't explain it, but I think it is obvious that the AI does not use any money in order to upgrade...

One sign of it may be that it upgrades everything in a row. That's what shocks me in this anyway: the AI seems to be in a block of stone, never showing parcimony, and upgrades everything suddenly. It could upgrade units after units, turn after turn, to prevent any attack, instead of "waiting" it has enough moeny to upgrade everything. Unless it has some taste for David Copperfield?

Plus, the AI has the same amount of money showing in the diplomacy screen before and after the upgrade. So there is little chance that even if this money was only the money the AI wanted to trade, it would be still the same.

So what I'm thinking actually, to be frank, is that you fans are kind of funny and irredeemable... :lol:
 
Naukaukodem said:
Plus, the AI has the same amount of money showing in the diplomacy screen before and after the upgrade. So there is little chance that even if this money was only the money the AI wanted to trade, it would be still the same.
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It's trivially easy to check that the AI does not display it's full funds, but only those it is willing to trade in the diplomacy screen by judicious use of spies. The discrepancies between their actual reserves and tradeable amounts can by in excess of 10000 gold by the modern age. The lack of change in the amount of tradeable cash is curious, but use of spies during an AI upgrade indicates that cash is in fact being spent (though the AI get huge discounts on upgrade costs at all difficulty levels). That would suggest an error in the mechanism by which an AI determines how much of a reserve to keep, not in the upgrading mechanism though.
 
Would the AI have enough money to upgrade all its archers into longbows in the ancient/medieval age? This is such an annoying thing because it forces to change any tactic based on Queshuas, Swordmen or else into a massive and wasting catapult campain, even for two only of them. The time you built your swords and wait for your cities to grow in order to be able to maintain more cities and conquer others without too much penalty, they have the bows in every single city. This is a little too much IMO.
 
The AI gets massive discount on upgrades. Also, it has money it's not willing to trade away. If you want to see how things stand, turn on the chipotle cheatcode and press Shift-F2 for debug screen.

Why does the AI get massive discounts (and loads of other benefits)? Because it's quite stupid, so it needs advantages over the human player. If the AI gets smarter, the advantages should be lowered or even removed. But before that, it's simply a gameplay issue. If you don't like that, mod away the advantages and crush the poor AI. Or code a smarter AI that doesn't need the advantages (Blake is on that already, hope that Firaxis reviews his work at some point and brings out a patch with smarter AI and fewer artificial advantages).

Do I like playing against a stupid AI that gets loads of advantages? Honestly, that's asking if I like playing cIV, and thus the only possible answer is "often times yes, sometimes no". Would I like smarter AI and less artificial advantages more than the current situation? Most likely yes.
 
Can always just turn off Tech Trading when you start the game too... That pretty much shuts all that down :)
 
Overcast32 said:
Can always just turn off Tech Trading when you start the game too... That pretty much shuts all that down :)
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I may be mistaken, but it seemed to me when I did that, that all it does is stop "you" from tech trading. Doing this didn't slow down the AI civs at all, so while it is possible they weren't trading, I sure didn't see a tangible result that you would expect.
 
My understanding and feeling is also that it shuts out player only, AI's still keep on trading. I've seen so many different comments around the board about "no tech trading" that i'm not sure :rolleyes:
 
Julian Delphiki said:
My understanding and feeling is also that it shuts out player only, AI's still keep on trading. I've seen so many different comments around the board about "no tech trading" that i'm not sure :rolleyes:
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For one thing, I sure wouldn't trust anybody who had not at least ran a game on it, as everyone seems to 'think' it stops trading altogether, but as I say through trying it, I didn't get that impression at all.
 
Elandal said:
The AI gets massive discount on upgrades.
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Since it upgrades whenever it wants massively. I would say it upgrades freely. For example, I saw the AI upgrade at those two different times: 1) after getting the tech 2) right before being attacked.
How come that at those two times, particularly the second, the AI get the gold to upgrade? Why shouldn't have to wait some turns?
If you ask me, the AI gets so huge discounts that one can call it a present. Same goes for the techs. (how the AI could upgrade every units every times being ahead technologically...)

As to the AI... pardon me, but do you call me stupid? Plus I explained somewhere already that I don't think that the AI or the player in Civ needs to be particularly smart. The basics are pretty simple. You have to produce, stack and attack one single point. (or maybe two)
What to produce? AI can handle it. If it produces the wrong units, it loses, if it is lucky, it is challenging. Someone could always program it so that it takes into account the enemy units it can really see.
How to stack? The Civ4 AI seems not to know how to concentrate its forces. But I am sure it should not be too complicated to program: show a point on the friendly map, and send the no garrison units there, and wait until x units are one this point. Then, launch the attack. (stack attack) >> stacks are strategically usefull only on attack, to defend itself the time to reach the city, and to attack in the same turn.
Which point to attack? The current AI attacks the weakest points. This sometimes leads to futile fights, with weak units for a weak and poorly defended city. This often brings the player to reload the game, as the involved city may be important with growth. Anyway, what does the player in most cases? He attacks the nearest and more valuable city. The AI should do the same. And I don't think it should be disavantaged if it moves its units in stack: the game is then reduced to what I have, what I don't have: techs.
 
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