Lt. 'Killer' M.
Deity
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actually it's 120% at Rengent, so nothing is level. And it can't be set below 100%, even on chieftain 
What is "Cheating"??
- Thread starter ainwood
- Start date
Masquerouge
Deity
You really lost me there... at what level is it in Regent ? And is it to your advantage or to the AI's ?
Lt. 'Killer' M.
Deity
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ah, if it's 100%, if you offer 100 gold, the AI say its 100, and if an AI offer 100 gold, it's 100, too. If it's 120%, your 100 is worth 100, but the AIs 100 is worth 120. So they'll be less ready to deal with you, after all the other AIs offer "more".... So 100% is fair, anything above is AI advantage...
Killer: Are you sure? Is your's the latest patch? Mine is 110% at cheiftain and 120% at warlord 
Masquerouge: Make it plain simple, the higher it is, the easier for AI's to trade with one another.
Here's another example:
160% AI-AI trade. So if the AI (Aztecs) want Construction from the AI (French), and say the Aztecs have 200 in their coffers.
The French says "Hey, we're gonna give ya the tech if you've got 320 to offer"
The Aztecs says "Sure, this guy is playing at Deity so it's 160% multiplier for my offerings and I've 200 gold times 1.6, it comes right about 320"
French says "Ok, deal. I'm taking 200 of your gold and sold"
Masquerouge: Make it plain simple, the higher it is, the easier for AI's to trade with one another.
Here's another example:
160% AI-AI trade. So if the AI (Aztecs) want Construction from the AI (French), and say the Aztecs have 200 in their coffers.
The French says "Hey, we're gonna give ya the tech if you've got 320 to offer"
The Aztecs says "Sure, this guy is playing at Deity so it's 160% multiplier for my offerings and I've 200 gold times 1.6, it comes right about 320"
French says "Ok, deal. I'm taking 200 of your gold and sold"
Lt. 'Killer' M.
Deity
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ah..... I moght have modded it down 
Zouave
Crusader
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Originally posted by ainwood
. . .A computer program, and hence the AI, cannot cheat - it must follow the rules.
The issue here is that the AI plays by slightly different rules to the player. It may be just semantics, but this is an AI Advantage, not a cheat.
I'll go now.
Yeah, surrrre.
I assume you are being funny - or maybe you used to work in Public Relations for Bill Clinton?!
It's the same kind of sophistry.
sumthinelse
civ investigator
Originally posted by Zouave
Yeah, surrrre.
I assume you are being funny - or maybe you used to work in Public Relations for Bill Clinton?!
It depends on what you mean by "is." Public Realtions guys? Bill didn't need any help to conjure up a verbal fog....
Evincar
Iron works is a legend!!
Originally posted by Lt. 'Killer' M.
actually it's 120% at Rengent, so nothing is level. And it can't be set below 100%, even on chieftain
Killer, as I've posted in the FAQ it's 130 % for regent. Even chieftain is 110%, so it's unfair!
sumthinelse
civ investigator
Originally posted by Evincar
Killer, as I've posted in the FAQ it's 130 % for regent. Even chieftain is 110%, so it's unfair!
How can something be unfair to me if I am in control of it? In 1.21f I can change the AI to AI trade rate to 100 which makes it fair. In earlier patches I would agree it was unfair.
And in this case, I think Firaxis was listening to us and did something
Baron Scot
Minister of Slacking
nothing i have read thusfar has listed any 'cheats' except for AI tech trade.
is this all you are whining about? o no! english traded pottery for construction
and what is this 120%=100%
does that mean i can trade 100 gold for 120 gold?
i think i know how i am paying taxes this year
is this all you are whining about? o no! english traded pottery for construction
and what is this 120%=100%
does that mean i can trade 100 gold for 120 gold?
i think i know how i am paying taxes this year
Zouave
Crusader
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- Dec 21, 2001
- Messages
- 1,603
AI cheats have been listed on various threads on this forum for months.
How about AI ocean-going galleys even when I have the Lighthouse and Magnetism and Navigation?
How about AI galleys teleporting themselves thousands of miles?
How about settlers marching in to your territory, not leaving, and then teleporting themselves to the OTHER side of your civ to some open tiles they should not even know exist?
How about AI omnisicence in seeing the entire board?
How about AI freebie settlers that appear with the nearest military unit to a razed city and those open tiles?
How about the example I post a few days ago of how after a city was razed, an AI transport promptly showed up depositing settlers and military on the open tiles faster than I could get a settler there? BUT THEN, when I went to autosave and went back several turns and put units on the coastal tiles, the transport NEVER SHOWED UP! That is a cheat.
Those are all at REGENT!! I can't even imagine what it does a Deity.
You bet it cheats.
How about AI ocean-going galleys even when I have the Lighthouse and Magnetism and Navigation?
How about AI galleys teleporting themselves thousands of miles?
How about settlers marching in to your territory, not leaving, and then teleporting themselves to the OTHER side of your civ to some open tiles they should not even know exist?
How about AI omnisicence in seeing the entire board?
How about AI freebie settlers that appear with the nearest military unit to a razed city and those open tiles?
How about the example I post a few days ago of how after a city was razed, an AI transport promptly showed up depositing settlers and military on the open tiles faster than I could get a settler there? BUT THEN, when I went to autosave and went back several turns and put units on the coastal tiles, the transport NEVER SHOWED UP! That is a cheat.
Those are all at REGENT!! I can't even imagine what it does a Deity.
You bet it cheats.
There is also another way that the AI cheats and that is that the AI can FORCE you to see him/her while they always have a chance to refuse you. By forcing I am referring to the way the AI sometimes come to you without the "XX wants to see you" popup.
That is a way of cheating not related to tech trade. Sure it is not a very big advantage but it still is a cheat.
That is a way of cheating not related to tech trade. Sure it is not a very big advantage but it still is a cheat.
Trabpukcip
Agent of Doom
Yes I agree it cheat. So what? I beat it anyway. I never lost a game at regent and below, Monarch is challeging and emperor and deity are, well, hard to beat.
But that isn't realy important. The important point is that we are human and there for superior in the way we think and predict the moves of the adversary.
Think about this... cheiftain is just to ease. It's nearly impossible to not build all wonders. The game would be so boring if it was made easeer. I mean, if it didn't cheat, there would never be any threat.
So may be there's a compromise. Let all the actual levels the way they are now and add a new level in which the AI would as plain as we are. That way everyone could be as happy as an Idian cow.
But that isn't realy important. The important point is that we are human and there for superior in the way we think and predict the moves of the adversary.
Think about this... cheiftain is just to ease. It's nearly impossible to not build all wonders. The game would be so boring if it was made easeer. I mean, if it didn't cheat, there would never be any threat.
So may be there's a compromise. Let all the actual levels the way they are now and add a new level in which the AI would as plain as we are. That way everyone could be as happy as an Idian cow.
cracker
Gil Favor's Sidekick
Whether you call it "AI cheating" or just "Another in a long series of undocumented excess advantages" for me the real issue is that most of these things are just part of the skinner box effect.
For those people that do not know what skinner boxes are, they are the special cages for conducting behavior research on laboratory rats and monkeys and that typically contain a food reward drawer, an indicator light, a sound cue device and then a floor of separate bars that can be electrified to deliver a mild shock to the occupant.
Skinner boxes have been used for many purposes, but one interesting study showed that if you train a subject animal to perform certain tasks in the box such as to earn food by pressing a bar or ringing bells in a certain order then if you radically change the rules of how the rewards are given or substitute random punishment for the rewards, then the subjects first get frantic and disillusioned followed by hostility to their environment and finally by various forms of apathetic paralysis and even death.
If you hook a skinner box up to a cornpooter random number generator and put a rat in it, then usually the rat will become so distraught in just a few days of being randomly shocked, flashed, beeped, and or fed, that it will just give up trying to alter its behavior, and just cower in a corner, stop eating, and eventually die.
Even if you are getting the crap beat out of you in a game, it ought to be in an expected way and not just because of a new random outcome that makes you say "Never thought that could happen."
I wouldn't find a cloud of flying monkeys that suddenly flew out of the eastern hills in Civ3 and carried away all the civilians, gold, and "little dogs, too" from my cities to be a new and exciting game feature. I would just think, "Holey, sh_t, how did I miss that option in the game description."
Some of the stuff that has been hard coded into the game play feels more like flying monkeys or the effects of being locked in a plexiglas box and shocked repeatedly and randomly.
I also feel that most of the so called cheats really are unnecessary because in games of this type, the margin of victory in a fairly matched contest, can often be found in the management actions that squeeze the extra drop of blood out of the turnip pile at every single opportunity. Calculating that you need to shift the fourth civilian from the upper left to stop working in a floodplain and go over a work in the forest for one turn so you can finish that settler a turn earlier is exactly what computers do better than most humans. Yes, the humans can do it if given enough time and stamina, but the AIs should do it just like the flow of electrons in a superconducting wire.
In an empire of 500 civilians, knowing that citizen number 327 needs to stop producing food for a turn so that her city does not grow by another person because there will not possibly be enough food to feed that extra person, thats what computer AI are supposed to do without even hesitating.
Instantly assessing a pattern of 21 terrain squares to determine the optimal pattern of worker terraforming actions, that is what computer AIs do in just nanoseconds.
The production management AI in this game ought to be its strongest asset without miraculous strategic programming. The AI ought to spank my red baboon arse in every game when it comes to making efficient use of production resources to crank out the best and most effective units and improvements.
Instead we have the AIs following fixed production strategies that lead them merrily to their doom even when they can buy build and grow stuff at 60 cent or 80 cents on the dollar.
99% of the power game players do not use even parts of the production or worker automation systems because these systems result in significant lost opportunites and sometimes even death (for the workers or the civ: not necessarily the human players.) An AI working to clear jungle will clear one jungle tile next to city and then move 17 spaces through mountains and jungle to clear a jungle tile at another city before trooping dutifully back across the planet to clear a second jungle tile at the first city. I'd have to cheat to make up for decision process as well.
The hidden advantages are just absolutely unnecessary. If the difficulty level of the game needed to be increased to provide new challenges to the better players, why not just add new and higher difficulty levels and/or provide a reward system that included some form of open ended scoring.
If someone editted the diety cost advantage to be 3 vs the human 10 instead the current 6 vs 10, and then they spanked the AI royally wouldn't that pose enough of a challenge?
Why add in the hidden advantages and other undocumented game play tilts while there are still other challenges that have not yet been met?
I find the game enjoyable. Its future potential is exciting. But I do have to step back regularly and say "Man, that was pretty darned stupid, did the guy that coded that piece of the game ever see what it really does in the real game." Then I just develop a strategy that makes it so I either exploit the stupidity or never create the circumstances where it can effect me negatively in the game. And then I move on.
.... unless of course it is the simultaneous barbarian uprising thing
Man I just hate 240 horsemen all in one turn.
For those people that do not know what skinner boxes are, they are the special cages for conducting behavior research on laboratory rats and monkeys and that typically contain a food reward drawer, an indicator light, a sound cue device and then a floor of separate bars that can be electrified to deliver a mild shock to the occupant.
Skinner boxes have been used for many purposes, but one interesting study showed that if you train a subject animal to perform certain tasks in the box such as to earn food by pressing a bar or ringing bells in a certain order then if you radically change the rules of how the rewards are given or substitute random punishment for the rewards, then the subjects first get frantic and disillusioned followed by hostility to their environment and finally by various forms of apathetic paralysis and even death.
If you hook a skinner box up to a cornpooter random number generator and put a rat in it, then usually the rat will become so distraught in just a few days of being randomly shocked, flashed, beeped, and or fed, that it will just give up trying to alter its behavior, and just cower in a corner, stop eating, and eventually die.
Even if you are getting the crap beat out of you in a game, it ought to be in an expected way and not just because of a new random outcome that makes you say "Never thought that could happen."
I wouldn't find a cloud of flying monkeys that suddenly flew out of the eastern hills in Civ3 and carried away all the civilians, gold, and "little dogs, too" from my cities to be a new and exciting game feature. I would just think, "Holey, sh_t, how did I miss that option in the game description."
Some of the stuff that has been hard coded into the game play feels more like flying monkeys or the effects of being locked in a plexiglas box and shocked repeatedly and randomly.
I also feel that most of the so called cheats really are unnecessary because in games of this type, the margin of victory in a fairly matched contest, can often be found in the management actions that squeeze the extra drop of blood out of the turnip pile at every single opportunity. Calculating that you need to shift the fourth civilian from the upper left to stop working in a floodplain and go over a work in the forest for one turn so you can finish that settler a turn earlier is exactly what computers do better than most humans. Yes, the humans can do it if given enough time and stamina, but the AIs should do it just like the flow of electrons in a superconducting wire.
In an empire of 500 civilians, knowing that citizen number 327 needs to stop producing food for a turn so that her city does not grow by another person because there will not possibly be enough food to feed that extra person, thats what computer AI are supposed to do without even hesitating.
Instantly assessing a pattern of 21 terrain squares to determine the optimal pattern of worker terraforming actions, that is what computer AIs do in just nanoseconds.
The production management AI in this game ought to be its strongest asset without miraculous strategic programming. The AI ought to spank my red baboon arse in every game when it comes to making efficient use of production resources to crank out the best and most effective units and improvements.
Instead we have the AIs following fixed production strategies that lead them merrily to their doom even when they can buy build and grow stuff at 60 cent or 80 cents on the dollar.
99% of the power game players do not use even parts of the production or worker automation systems because these systems result in significant lost opportunites and sometimes even death (for the workers or the civ: not necessarily the human players.) An AI working to clear jungle will clear one jungle tile next to city and then move 17 spaces through mountains and jungle to clear a jungle tile at another city before trooping dutifully back across the planet to clear a second jungle tile at the first city. I'd have to cheat to make up for decision process as well.
The hidden advantages are just absolutely unnecessary. If the difficulty level of the game needed to be increased to provide new challenges to the better players, why not just add new and higher difficulty levels and/or provide a reward system that included some form of open ended scoring.
If someone editted the diety cost advantage to be 3 vs the human 10 instead the current 6 vs 10, and then they spanked the AI royally wouldn't that pose enough of a challenge?
Why add in the hidden advantages and other undocumented game play tilts while there are still other challenges that have not yet been met?
I find the game enjoyable. Its future potential is exciting. But I do have to step back regularly and say "Man, that was pretty darned stupid, did the guy that coded that piece of the game ever see what it really does in the real game." Then I just develop a strategy that makes it so I either exploit the stupidity or never create the circumstances where it can effect me negatively in the game. And then I move on.
.... unless of course it is the simultaneous barbarian uprising thing
Man I just hate 240 horsemen all in one turn.
TheNiceOne
Emperor
Assume a civ have a tech which it will sell for 360 gp. If you only have 350 gp, it won't sell it to you. But another civ can offer 300 gp, but the offer is treated as if it was 120% of it, i.e. 360 gp. The civ selling it did only get 300 gp (at least I believe so), but the civ that was behind in tech got the tech cheaper than you will.Originally posted by Baron Scot
nothing i have read thusfar has listed any 'cheats' except for AI tech trade.
is this all you are whining about? o no! english traded pottery for construction
and what is this 120%=100%
does that mean i can trade 100 gold for 120 gold?
i think i know how i am paying taxes this year
I'm a bit unsure about trades between you and an AI civ though. In the FAQ it looks like the AI will demand more than the real price from you. Ex: You and an AI civ want to trade two techs that are worth exactly the same. Will the AI accept this, or does it demand an additional gold sum of 20% of the tech?
So, does trade bonus = 120% mean that an AI civ will give other AI civs better deals (as in the first example) or that it will give you unfair deals (as int the second example) or both?
Lt. 'Killer' M.
Deity
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@ TheNiceOne: both! I tested this by playing games with only one opponent and varying the %, then doing it with two opponents... lots of spying to be done
- Joined
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Originally posted by Zouave
Yeah, surrrre.
I assume you are being funny - or maybe you used to work in Public Relations for Bill Clinton?!
The point is that a computer cannot break the rules that they have been programmed with.
sumthinelse
civ investigator
The regent setting can be anywhere from 100 to 1000, so it's not necessarily 130. There was a hard-coded AI advantage, but Firaxis fixed it for us so we could set the AI trade rate from 100 to whatever. It was kind of sneaky before, but somebody went to some trouble to put it right out in the open and completely configurable, pretty much what I wanted. I guess I think we ought to look at this a little differently. It's not hidden and we don't have to use the default if we don't want to. Don't you think they deserve some praise for fixing this?
I agree with you that the default at regent should be 100, and that the AI rate field might be a little bit hard to find the first time, but it's exactly where it should be in the editor so you could have different rates on different levels. I'll bet some players like the AI to get techs faster so they can trade with the AI more. (I set my AI tech rate to 100 at regent.
This is beginning to sound like an affirmative action discussion. "We want equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes!" Firaxis might say, "In fact, you always win at regent even with the AI rate at 130, so we are just making the outcome a little more even...." I think it is even and fair if you just change one field in the editor (set the AI trade rate to 100).
TheNiceOne
Emperor
Yes, but not all of those can be trusted. There have been quite a few AI cheat threads which has turned out to be instances where the poster have overlooked something. I don't mean to say that the AI don't cheat though.
I'm still not sure that the AI cheats here. I have seen AI galleys sink, and I have crossed ocean with gallyes (and w/o lighthouse/magnetism) myself.
Being forced to leave out of another civ's territory and thereby teleported may also play a part here.
There are two different issues here. One is that AI seems to be able to demand withdrawal faster than we can. This may be cheating, and I would really like to always have the option of demanding withdrawal.
The other issue is the teleporting. I really don't like it, but I believe it applies identically to us and ai. When forced to leave, a unit is teleported to the closest non-enemy square. A better solution would be that such a unit had to withdraw by normal means or be disbanded. This is no cheat though, since the same rule applies to us.
It doesn't see the entire board completely, because I've seen the AI is much better at finding the free spots after they have obtained my map than before. But it sees a lot and obvioulsy cheats. This cheat is a compensation for the human "cheat" which is called memory though
I'm not convinced that the AI cheats with settlers. I've seen ai civs having settlers around without any places to use them, so it doesn't need to be a cheat when the AI has a settler ready.
It is a cheat that the AI knows when a city is razed and an area is open for settling though (including knowing whether the coastline is free), but this is the AI omnisicence cheat you mentioned over, not a new one.
I'm 99% sure that the general behaiviour of the AI is identical regardless of difficulty level. So there are no more cheats on Deity than Regent, except for the bonuses found in the editor.Those are all at REGENT!! I can't even imagine what it does a Deity.
To sum up my opinion: I don't think the AI cheats as much as it has been accused of, but it certainly cheats. The problem would mostly be non-existant if the cheats were documented, but cheats that allow the AI to do something the human player cannot is generally bad: An AI galley should not be able to cross oceans that the human galleys cannot cross (although I have not seen any evidence here).
