J'Accuse!

[Golden Bear]

For a lead in... I have tried to remain objective about AI cheating in CivIII. I have tended to believe that it was a figment of imagination built upon poorly documented instances of occasional long shot odds. I mean, other than the way that AI civs always seem to miraculously settle next to resources that won't appear for Eons.

I'm also indifferent to the way the game plays as all the AI civs vs. me. I'm OK with that.

However, I just saw the belief breaker.

Pangea, full land, huge. I have spotless rep. Really. Never broke a treaty. Everybody except the Zulu (I'm executing them) is polite or better with luxury incentives to boot.

Bingo, the Babs break double treaty and attack from ROP rape - sorry, but the "how to beat the AI on builder" does not really work, BTW.

OK, I'm cool with that. I am a couple of techs ahead of everybody. Despite a land grab following AI wars I have AT LEAST 1 infantry in every city while no civ has an offensive unit better than cavalry. Cav, of course is very good. But how good?

How about, 11 cities attacked with single Cav vs. single Inf, for, what would you guess as results? Nope, you are wrong. 11 cities taken. Each single (1 attacker) cav captured or destroyed a city protected by inf. I'm thinking, what, 6 attack vs. 10 (doubled for fortified?) is less than 1:3 chance of victory. I should have lost 3 cities, maybe 4.

Remember now, that cav will not attack a pile of arty with a single inf guarding it. Suddenly, boom, every attack goes good.

Calling the number dudes out there. Can you give me the odds of this one? Aw, I know that it is impossible. Shoot, I just lost 3 tanks and a cav trying to finish off a 1 square musketman in a city. I did not whine (then) but maybe a little moan now.

I really don't mind a little AI cheating. But cmon. Oh well, I guess that I'll have to go make them go cry for their mommies. I'm going to win anyway, but this much desperation by the code is embarrasing.

AFAIC this puts the "does the AI cheat in combat" question out of reach.

Golden Bear (with his eyes wider open now!)

[vmxa1]

The designers say they do not have any cheats as it relates to combat. Yes they do know the disposition of your units and the tiles.

Anyway I would not try to get away with one defender, if that town could be reached in one turn, even if it was mech. You can and will lose some ugly matches.

True I am shocked that all 11 went down to defeat.

[Golden Bear]

And I did not intend to use only a single defender - it's a period of rapid resettlement due to WWs and it takes time to build up enough units to double everywhere.

I was surprised that I would get any attack since typically the AI does not seem to want to violate a ROP if they are polite with you.

[start edit]
VXMA was kind enought to remind me that there is a 25% bonus for fortification without walls. Thus, infantry defending should be 10+2.5 vs. cavalry attacking at 6. This should mean that the cav has about a 30% chance at winnning. 0.3 to the 11th is .0000018 or .00018%. If I did it a million times it should occur twice. I wish that I had rerun the turn! I just moved forward and cleaned the Babs out of every place they had invaded.
[end of edit]

A problem with ROP rape for the AI is that they don't plan well and wind up with their units spread all over the map in penny pockets far from their home. And I was trying so hard to be peaceful. Sigh.


Golden Bear

[vmxa1]

Fort gets 25% bonus. If no wall and in a town then no bonus for either of those.

[Mace]

Re: J'Accuse!

Originally posted by Golden Bear
Bingo, the Babs break double treaty and attack from ROP rape - sorry, but the "how to beat the AI on builder" does not really work, BTW.

I agree, at least on Monarch and above. You can't be
*solely* builder on the high levels, or you'll get your keyster handed to you 99 times out of 100.

Originally posted by Golden Bear
How about, 11 cities attacked with single Cav vs. single Inf, for, what would you guess as results? Nope, you are wrong. 11 cities taken.

Now, you know, if you or I tried to attack 11 enemy towns each with 1 cav, we would laughed off the continent! I would get maybe...maybe 1 hit on the AI infantry health bars...

[Terra Nullius]

heyya gb,
i suspect the problem is in the 'randomising' algorithm that is used. basically, the rng doesn't (generate random numbers that is). it does a reasonable job of spitting out numbers that look random, but it is not genuinely random, and sometimes it gets itself stuck in one of these ruts.

much as i would like to blame the ai, firaxis, sid, soren, george bush and the sicko who introduced me to civ in the first place, it's really not their fault. the only way out of it will be when we get a true, hardware-based rng. simple enough, just measuring something like thermal noise across a resisitor would do it, but until someone takes the trouble to build it into the hardware, there's nothing to do but grin and umm, you know.

[Golden Bear]

Hey Leben - that is the most satisfying explanation that I have received. I cannot really argue when the design team says that the AI does not cheat in combat but 11 1 cav victories makes me shake my head.

Thanks for sharing the idea!


Golden (grin and) Bear (it)

[joncnunn]

Well, one more thing to note:

By default, preserve random seed is on for epic games and off for the offical version of each of the conquest scenerios.

So, if in an epic, one calvary attacks your inf and takes the city, it does no good to reload back one turn and simply replay, you'll get the same result.

You'd need to do something different, maybe draft an Inf so the city isn't taken.

Also, what the heck were you thinking having only one defender in a city the AI could reach with 1 unit? Why allow a chance to lose a city at all?

[Golden Bear]

Argh! Once again, here is the situation.

Yours truly is sitting in a position that he has ROPs with everybody and is feeding them luxury bribes to keep them happy. Everybody is Polite or Gracious and has been for a long time.

That is, except for the Zulu, who I was taking out of the Civ pool so that everybody would fit on one screen for F4. And the Zulu had no friends.

At the same time, there were multiple wars going on and leaving settlement space available so that I was putting settlers out rapidly too.

Thus, I had double Riflemen in my core and most of my cities but I had not had enough time to double defender ALL the new ones. I was putting out new settlements almost as fast as defenders at that point. Naturally these were not important cities that I lost.

That is why there were 11 cities with single Riflemen defenders.

I usually leave preserve seed off so that I can rerun unusual things and see how they happen multiple times. I just forgot to do so in this case since I was POd at the Babylonians and wanted to pile right into them.

[vmxa1]

Maybe it is time to reconsider RoP's. I seldom have them. When I do it is is usually early in the game and I want to allow other civs that have been at war to get out of my land quickly. I do this as I want them out before they decide I look like a target.

If i cannot afford to defend a city, I will not found it, if it is any danager (read can be attack without notice).

[Golden Bear]

I agree with you... I have been following Drakan's "How to Builder win on Diety" ideas and was trying something different.

Normally I don't found a new city without lots of defense.

However, in the interest of trying different things in order to find different paths for playing the game, I had a different game plan for this one:

Play for Diplo but when the WWs break out, try to steal as much land as possible in between other civs. Try to be as expansionist as possible without being outright warmonger.

Hence, I deliberately put myself into this position. I felt relatively safe since I had not been ROP attacked for many games.

It turned out that it was a different path for winning. It actually allowed me to clean up some messy Babylonian cities that were scattered around the periphery of my land.

[UnOrthOdOx]

Ok...

Forgive me here.

In the top post, it was 11 infantry killed:

How about, 11 cities attacked with single Cav vs. single Inf, for, what would you guess as results? Nope, you are wrong. 11 cities taken. Each single (1 attacker) cav captured or destroyed a city protected by inf. I'm thinking, what, 6 attack vs. 10 (doubled for fortified?) is less than 1:3 chance of victory. I should have lost 3 cities, maybe 4.

My first reaction was that this was indeed a little out of line, and a tremendous stroke of bad luck. (then, I've seen 32 cavalry lose to a single spear before) My instant question was to ask what experience the respective forces were. 5 HP cavalry on 3 HP infantry wouldn't be TOO especially out of the realm of possibility for example.


A little later, it becomes an entirely plausible attack on 11 RIFLEMEN:

Argh! Once again, here is the situation.

Yours truly is sitting in a position that he has ROPs with everybody and is feeding them luxury bribes to keep them happy. Everybody is Polite or Gracious and has been for a long time.

That is, except for the Zulu, who I was taking out of the Civ pool so that everybody would fit on one screen for F4. And the Zulu had no friends.

At the same time, there were multiple wars going on and leaving settlement space available so that I was putting settlers out rapidly too.

Thus, I had double Riflemen in my core and most of my cities but I had not had enough time to double defender ALL the new ones. I was putting out new settlements almost as fast as defenders at that point. Naturally these were not important cities that I lost.

That is why there were 11 cities with single Riflemen defenders.

Well, I'ld expect similar, or close to it, results from such an attack there.

So, which was it?

[vmxa1]

Good catch Uno. Yeah rifles and infantry are not even close to the same thing.

[Golden Bear]

Pardon.

It was indeed infantry.

Note the attempted math in a subsequent post of 6 attack vs. 10 defence.

You guys are tough on this old Bear!

BTW, I would say that 32 cav losing to a single spearman would be grotesquely worse than what I quoted!

In fairness, I have attacked three fortified spearmen in a town with three 3 dot horseman and won all three battles to take the town!!


Golden Bear (with arrows dangling from his hide!)

[inca911]

I generally avoid ROPs. I do not want the interior cities of my empire to require defenders, and having enemy forces wandering about is no good. By avoiding ROPs, I can push my defense out to the borders and use a couple mobile forces per section of border as a rapid response in case of problems.

I do use ROPs once I am on my own culturally-covered continent. This allows me to sneak defenders and settlers into the culture cracks created during other civs' wars.