So the AI doesn't cheat with gold, huh?

[LegioCorvus]

According to Jon Shafer:

Just to clear some things up - on Prince the AI plays by almost the exact same rules as the human. It receives a marginal discount to unit gold and supply costs, but that's pretty much it. There's no cheating with construction, gold production, happiness, puppet rules, research agreements, visibility, combat odds or whatever else.

On higher levels the AI gets bonuses to the production and generation of things like units, buildings, etc. and discounts to costs like maintenance, but it can never "snap its fingers" and make anything appear under any circumstances. How closely it has to obey the game rules does not change based on difficulty level. If an AI signed a RA agreement with someone, it meant they had the requisite gold (for at least one turn) - it may have gotten it from another player, from a goody hut, from disbanding something or even from losing out on a wonder (which they like to build). But it's always legit.

Emphasis mine.

I was shopping around to sell my resources for extra gold in a recent game, and in one turn Wu Zetian went from around 90 to -173, on the very same turn that she made a research agreement. Hmmm...





This seems to directly contradict what Shafer said. Now, I don't know about you, but I find it hard to get a -173 deficit when I'm gaining 19 per turn. However, if I just agreed to a research agreement, and *snapped* my fingers to deficit spend, then this would be very possible.

I'm not bringing this up because it's game breaking or anything. It's not. If the AI needs to do this kind of stuff, fine. This pic is from an immortal OCC challenge game (in case anyone is wondering why my culture is the way it is) and I don't honestly think it will make a difference.

I'm bringing this up because I don't like being lied to.

If I got something wrong here, please explain it to me, because I would like to believe the lead designer isn't purposefully lying to his already upset client base.

 

[gunter]

It is clear also to stones that Shafer lies.

The AI cheats in a heavy way like a mad cow.

Money cheating is a classic behaviour but the worst one is unit production cheating. That makes me laugh loudly, the AI can spawn even 50 units in a bunch of turns

Ridiculous, crappy and pathetic AI

 

[jjkrause84]

The AI doesn't cheat with gold.....it manipulates gold in strategically advantageous ways unavailable to the player for balance reasons.

See?

 

[gunter]

The AI doesn't cheat with gold.....it manipulates gold in strategically advantageous ways unavailable to the player for balance reasons.

See?

Yeah that's a Shafer sentence.....

 

[Benzidrine]

Wow everyday someone finds a new problem in this game, at this rate they are soon going to discover this game causes cancer. Good find though.

Lol this makes it at least twice that I can remember schafer being deceptive, once when he talked about gold and once when he said the game was good

 

[lissenber]

Wow everyday someone finds a new problem in this game, at this rate they are soon going to discover this game causes cancer. Good find though.

Well, the light from mobile phones is known (not very widely, i`m afraid) to cause cancer. Imagine what the monitor can do to your health.

 

[CivDude86]

Maybe they had over 2 billion gold but the counter overflowed.

 

[Mathias]

Call up Wu Z in trade negotiations and see how much gold she really has. The negative amount shown in the overview is bugged. I've seen negative numbers myself after an AI-lump-sum-for-luxury trade deal expired.

 

[LegioCorvus]

Call up Wu Z in trade negotiations and see how much gold she really has. The negative amount shown in the overview is bugged. I've seen negative numbers myself after an AI-lump-sum-for-luxury trade deal expired.

Sorry, I kept on playing. Ended up with an epic battle with Siam (again) and OCC domination victory.

I should check that next time, but the fact is that she went into the negative, had only double digit gold the previous turn, and just signed a research agreement. I'm sure there could be confounding factors, but I think it's reasonable to believe that she made a research agreement that put her into the negative. Otherwise, why would that negative amount display in the diplomacy screen? Any gold she may have been able to use that turn in trades could just be gold given to the AI to cover for the little cheats like this that it is doing.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

The fact is it should be impossible for a player (human or AI) to go into the Negative Total gold numbers. There is more likely a bug than a cheat. (possibly an unintentional cheat where they fail to check the AI gold that it actually has, or where something that should not change the AI gold is changing it.)

 

[Valdyr]

I've gotten this impression too. In the diplomacy screen (not overview) I met Bismarck who had no gold to trade and an income of -26 gold per turn. Less than 10 turns later he comes to talk to me about a research agreement, which he can now afford because he has > +100 gold per turn. I can't even imagine how a player would turn their economy around that fast. Golden age, maybe, but I don't think he was in a position to go from -26 to over 100 just from bonus golden age commerce. Did he visit a German loan shark who operates on the scale of national debt?

 

[dexters]

AI usually banks massive happiness. It's not unrealistic they are entering golden ages every 20-30 turns

As for the negative gold thing, I think this needs to be moved to bug reports.

 

[Valdyr]

I wish there were more optional popups about what AIs are experiencing, then. If I knew he had entered a golden age or had just signed an agreement to receive gold per turn from someone, we wouldn't have to sit here and speculate about the AI cheating for lack of any other explanation for their sudden wealth.

 

[dexters]

I agree. News feed is both nice and lacking at the same time. I wont more stuff included in the news feed.

I feed like if you have 5 resource trade ending at the same turn, it chould be collapsed into 1 news item. Same with war declarations. 1 side war dec should be 1 news item. This frees up more room to include GA news items.

But I suspect what you have seen is a bug.

 

[snoochems]

According to Jon Shafer:

I'm bringing this up because I don't like being lied to.

It would be nice to have an AI that could play the game by the same rules, but yeah... I can live with it cheating.

What does suck though, is that this JS guy either is lying to us, or simply doesn't even know how his own game works.

Poor effort.

 

[PieceOfMind]

You know, it could be a bug.

i.e. whoever wrote the code

bool canResearchAgreement() {
	[I][COLOR="Green"]//if funds >= price {[/COLOR][/I]
		return true;
	[COLOR="green"][I]//} else {
	//	return false;
	//}
	// fix this later[/I][/COLOR]
}

mucked up really bad.

 

[Psyringe]

I have to admit that I am a bit skeptical of Shafer's claims about the AI. He obviously can't claim that the military AI is working well, because people would laugh in his face. He could say that the AI doesn't get gold cheats, even if it actually did, because due to most values being hidden, it'd be hard to prove him wrong. "It was just a bug" would then be a convenient excuse in case players did manage to prove a hidden cheat.

However, it's also possible that the economic part of the AI is indeed working very well, and may just have some minor bugs, which explain the findings of the OP.

Currently, I really don't know what to think. I have high respect for Firaxis and I don't see a good reason to accuse them of lying (and I don't want to either). On the other hand, judging from the shoddy state of the observable part of the AI, the claim that the non-observable part is excellently operating is so convenient to make that it isn't easy to believe either. It's a bit like going to a restaurant, seeing a pile of rotten fruits in the kitchen, and then having the cook claim "Well, yes, we didn't store those well, but the ones that went into your meal were great. We just can't show them to you."

I think the decision to hide so much information from the player is backfiring in multiple ways. I wish they hadn't done that.

 

[JimT]

Isn't the most obvious thing that they have +27 gold less 200 for research agreement. Not cheating but mis representation

 

[teh DG]

There might be a possibility if there was a trade mission involved?

 

[LegioCorvus]

You know, it could be a bug.

i.e. whoever wrote the code

bool canResearchAgreement() {
	[I][COLOR="Green"]//if funds >= price {[/COLOR][/I]
		return true;
	[COLOR="green"][I]//} else {
	//	return false;
	//}
	// fix this later[/I][/COLOR]
}

mucked up really bad.

Give that alternative, I'd actually prefer that JS is misleading us, as in he was given a forced release date for Civ5 and is trying to keep the player base calm while knowing that we have legitimate complaints and is doing what he can to actually finish the game. I would be (and am) still mad that we paid for a beta, but at least then there's hope. Though, again, I don't like being lied to.

Your alternative of JS actually not knowing how his game currently functions, and the idea that he isn't actually lying to us, but that he actually believes that this is a finished product and is only addressing issues brought up by the community in patches because of negative feedback and not from an innate desire to finish this game would cause me to think much, much less of JS.

In a strange way, I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.