I have proof that the AI cheats.

[CapnDraper]

I'd just like to add another comment to the chess Ai vs. Civ Ai discussion. A lot of good things have been said, so this is only an addition. Not only is Chess a *much* simpler game than Civ, but thousands of people have been working on AI's for Chess for over 50 years. Only a handful of people have been working on Civ AI's for just the last 10 years. So you can see how, even if they were the same simplicity, Civ AI's have a lot of catching up to do on chess ones. This goes for the AI of pretty any game, btw (except for pathfinding AI's - there's no excuse for that, since pathfinding algorithms have been around for longer than chess algorithms!).

Oh, and it's not cheating for the AI to see what you have garrisoned at a city. You can do the same thing by doing "Investigate City" under Espionage.

 

[Gyre]

CapnDraper,

Unless your game lets you run espionage missions without an embassy or intelligence agency, with no chance of failure, and free of charge, then, no, you can't do the same thing the AI does. The computer looks at every city on each turn at any point in the game. Even if you saved up the entire game, you probably couldn't afford to do that for one turn and it would provoke war against every enemy civ for all the failures that occured.

Sultan Bhargash,

Although the random number generator is flaky and causes some spectacularly improbable results, the improbability seems to work against both sides so it may not be cheating there.

 

[KALIROB2k2]

Originally posted by Sultan Bhargash
Yes the AI Cheats and the game is fixed. Go to war and watch the number of AI units increase geometrically. Wipe out the last AI civ city and watch a new one appear near the south pole. Attack a spearman with an Elite Cossack and watch the Cossack run...

I know huh? Its never ending, you have to be ready for it to cheat everytime. I guess that computer is a sore loser.

 

[Paeanblack]

The computer gets extra units on certain difficulty levels. So?

If you loaded a WW2 scenario, and Germany had a ton of panzers at the start, would Germany be cheating? No, it's just part of the starting options.

If you want to see a computer cheat, play Railroad Tycoon Gold. The computer was allowed to do anything it wanted. One time, it even sent a track off edge of the map, only to have it reenter onto the map halfway across the country. I managed to buyout the company during the game and tried out the mysterious track the computer built. I ran trains to the edge of the map, and they immediately teleported about 2000 miles. My 1870s era locomotive completed a Seattle->Minneapolis trip at an average speed of a little over 700 miles per hour. In a different game, it build a giant bridge from Miami, Florida to Abeline, Texas in response to my severing its empire by taking control of Mobile, Alabama. While human players weren't allowed to bridge anything wider than a small river, the computer could build a bridge across the Gulf of Mexico for the same price.

That is a cheating AI. Civ3 is fine.