Ok, word: The AI gets cost cheats at nearly every difficulty level:

[WolfEyes]

Is this a known thing? Sorry, but I haven't heard/read about it.

Yes, it seems that there is a 5 exp cap on animals, and a 10 exp cap on barbs. The animal exp cap I don't mind, as it makes sense to me, but I really don't agree with the 10 exp cap on barbs, after all, the barbs get progressively better units and can even have cities.

[notyoueither]

Yeah, my redcoats are really challenged by the barb horse archers in a terra game, or not...

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Markgraf
AI City placement by seeing the whole map is one of my most hated cheats. I think it's been toned down a tiny bit, but it's still there. For sure.

And now you get it too. Watch for the blue circles when you have a settler active. That is the game advising you on where to place a city.

[Soren Johnson]

Unseen resources do not factor at all into where the AI decides to founds cities or where the advisor recommends you to found.

[Akaoz]

*blink* Well, that selltles that then.

[ChaotikVisions]

On the cities thing, you sure it wasn't just the AI getting beat to settling one spot so it settled on another? I've seen it settle just to take up land that was available after being denied another spot. This was with other "good" land available, just a long ways from its current spot.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Soren Johnson Firaxis
Unseen resources do not factor at all into where the AI decides to founds cities or where the advisor recommends you to found.

Really? I scratch my head sometimes about the blue circles.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Proteus_MST
Same is true for Go.
Go players are ranked according to a System of Kyus and Dans and players with a higher Kyu (or lower Dan), i.e. those who are waeker/mor inexpirienced in the game, get from the beginning on 1-9 of stones in their color which are placed at certain locations on the Go-Board, to give the stronger player a handicap and increase the chances of the weaker player to win the game.

(btw. in contrary to chess, where it was able to develop AIs which have a chance to beat players with master level, the best AI for Go is only able to beat players up to maybe Kyu 12 [with Kyu being pupils levels and Dans being Master/Professional levels] although [or maybe rather, because] Go has much less rules than chess)

Go however has a larger board, and I believe in general it has possible moves per turn than chess. In addition, it takes a lot more processing power to calculate the result of a move (at least AIUI - Go is similar to Othello, isn't it?). These combine to make search infeasible, unless we get massively more powerful computers.

Hell, search is only feasible for chess with a lot of past games stored in memory.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by dearmad
Huh? I take you just can't think and observe then... because the inflation is clearly listed in the economy advisor.

/. = slashdot, a website. I was referring to your surpise at the number of people who barely read the OP.

Moving on:
For those of you getting all pissy that some people are disatisfied with the AI and who just make excuses for developers- go play Imperialism 2. The strategy is complex. The "AI" gets it. It plays the game. It's tough to beat even when it is not cheating.

You can program AI to play the game. It's not impossible.

Imperialism 2, IIRC, was completely different game from civ in terms of mechanics. You can't equate the complexity of the two.

[Drachasor]

Well, I'm sure there will eventually be some player modifications to the AI that make it a bit more effective (generally at least). It might be hard to design an AI from the ground up, but giving it some tweaks here and there has happened from the fan community (with CtP for instance).

The AI could certainly learn to use its troops more effectively. Right now it is laughably ineffective, often storing vast numbers of troops in towns you can't reach while you take over their border cities. They also don't send an army that is of a respectable size to attack you almost all the time. Instead they tend towards smaller waves of troops which only serves to strengthen your defenses by giving you experience. Occasionally it will attack with a bunch of troops, but this is pretty rare in my experience. On the other hand it is good at pillaging.

A few tweaks like that and the AI could be quite a bit more fearsome when it comes to war (and you might actually see an AI take out another AI now and then...right now they seem incapable of doing so--at least in all the games I've played).

-Drachasor

PS. I fully appreciate the difficulty of making a good AI, and my hat is off the Civ Team for the improvements they've made each iteration of Civ. I'm just pointing out that, as someone mentioned, giving the AI some tricks that the pros use and other small tweaks could improve it. Of course, it is easier to see what those things are when you have thousands upond thousands of people playing the game.

[Zoid]

Originally posted by Soren Johnson Firaxis
Unseen resources do not factor at all into where the AI decides to founds cities or where the advisor recommends you to found.

So, what are the blue circles for? I get them a lot. I assume it has something to do with resources that are not yet developed but should be. Or is it something else?

[Soren Johnson]

Originally posted by notyoueither


Really? I scratch my head sometimes about the blue circles.

well, it may be BAD AI. Not the same thing as cheating AI.

[spa]

Does anyone know if the AI sees where your units are? I ask becasue I had one game in which the French were dead set on taking away one of my coastal resources, but my battleship was more than a match for their destroyer. So they ran off, but when I decided to move my battleship off the resource, they immediately came back again. I sunk them, but I now wish I hadn't as I could have run a nice little test to see if they knew where my battleship was by moving off and on the resource on alternating turns.

On the whole I'm happy enough with Civ4's AI. It does a much better job than any of the past ones and in one game it pulled a nice naval invasion on me that actually included multiple fronts that was fairly impressive and made me scramble. I don't have a problem with the AI getting bonuses to compensate for the fact that it's just a computer, especially if it's clearly set out what they are (mixed feelings on that as it should have been in a table in the manual rather than making the players go digging for it). However, knowing where the human's units are just seems a tad much. If this is so I'll be disappointed. Again my experience is only circumstantial (more play at sea in a similar scenario is needed to find out). I'll still enjoy the game if it turns out that the AI knows where my units are, but I'll be a little disappointed in it.

[Todesengel]

Originally posted by nbarclay
Developing a great AI is a whole lot easier said than done. In chess, each turn, each player makes one move. In Civ, each turn, the player can make up to tens or even on larger maps hundreds of moves (including not just units but build orders, changes in civics, and so forth). In chess, you can see exactly what the situation is at any given time. In Civ, unless the AI cheats, there are a lot of things about what the other players are doing that the AI doesn't know. In chess, there are a maximum of two players. In Civ IV, there are up to 18. In chess, there are 64 squares. In Civ, there can be thousands or even tens of thousands. In chess, the exact outcome of every move is known in advance. In Civ, some types of moves have a random element involved in their outcomes. And so on.

When you compare the games' complexity, Civ is enough more complex than chess to make Deep Blue (the computer that could beat the world's top chess players) look slower than an Apple II. Using anything resembling a brute-force approach, a Civ-type AI cannot possibly consider more than a tiny fraction of all the different combinations of things that could happen over the next several turns.

That means AIs in Civ-type games are very heavily dependent on programmers to tell them what strategies to use in different types of situations. But even if the people who provided the strategy for the programmers were the best Civ players who would ever exist, AIs would still face several problems. First, something would inevitably get lost in the translation between what goes on in the best players' thinking and what gets programmed into the AIs. Second, the AIs would still be stuck working from general rules rather than being able to invent new situation-specific strategies on the fly. Third, in the absence of a genuinely massive investment in giving the AIs a variety of alternative strategies, human players could take advantage of learning to recognize patterns in the behavior programmed into the AIs. And in any case, after the game's been out a while, there will be human players who are better at the game than anyone was at the time the AI was originally developed and who share their knowledge with others.

So with anything resembling current artificial intelligence technology, it's just plain unrealistic to expect AIs to be able to compete with the best human players with both sides playing by the same rules. We can expect AIs to come closer over time as computers get more powerful and AI programming techniques improve, but if top players want AIs that can give them a serious fight, we have no choice but to give the AIs advantages on the higher difficulty levels.

So, according to this I´m a top player after my third game...
However, you are wrong. Ever heard of simulated neural networks? Do you think the cia have hundreds of thousends people reading every email and listening to every phone call they intercept? There is no need, that the programmer knows, what the "ai" is doing. But as the capaceties of home pcs is limited, it might be a good idea to combine different approches. Furthermore, "ai"s or "es" have certain strengthes compared to the human mind. Why not exploit them? Look at what the stardock guys have done!

[Markgraf]

Originally posted by Soren Johnson Firaxis
Unseen resources do not factor at all into where the AI decides to founds cities or where the advisor recommends you to found.

Glad to hear this. I would have sworn that it was happening in the case I described (as well as other, but not all, AI city placements I've seen). But if it's categorically rejected by Firaxis, then I'm a believer!