Artificial Intelligence? More like CHEATER!

[Gatekeeper]

Everyone:

Civ II's AI is a piece of crap cheating hunk of living sh*t!!!! I'm so PO'd right now at it I can't see straight! Damn f*cking thing ruined an entire damn game! Person shouldn't have to save every damn turn to prevent f*cking AI cheating!

Hope those damn programmers learn how to tweak their coding in the next go-around.

Piece of crap AI.

CYBERAmazon

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Resistance is futile. Lower your shields and disable your weapons. You will be assimilated into the Borg Collective.

[Mao]

Mind telling us how the AI screwed you? What was it? Submarine come out of no where and destroy your invasion force? Nukes come flying from no where? Space ship suddenly gets complete?

[The Mad Monk]

The last time I was that angry at the AI, it pulled the 'can't ask them to leave, because of imminent sneak attack' trick--with the added fun fact that the squatters were sitting on the mines that supplied three-quarters of the forces in that area!

CA, don't let it get to ya. Go into RULES.txt, give your units impossibly high attacks and moves, and let loose.

You'll feel better, trust me.

[Venger]

quote: Originally posted by CYBERAmazon on 05-12-2000 10:34 PM Everyone: Civ II's AI is a piece of crap cheating hunk of living sh*t!!!! I'm so PO'd right now at it I can't see straight! Damn f*cking thing ruined an entire damn game! Person shouldn't have to save every damn turn to prevent f*cking AI cheating!

Dude...chill the f#ck OUT! You must be playing on Deity...don't look at it as cheating. Look at it as advanced handicapping...sure, they roll out 15 cruise missiles against my Navy the second they discover rocketry. Sure, they can build Mechanized Infantry in a size 4 city every turn. Sure, they move all of their units into positions around your cities then suprise attack, with no consequences. It's humiliating, I know, but God damn it, take it like a man!!

quote: Hope those damn programmers learn how to tweak their coding in the next go-around.

That's the one piece of criticism that's not really been addressed with all of the Civ2-X releases. The AI - still sucks.

Venger

[Gatekeeper]

Mao:

**insane laughter** The AI has done all of those things to me in the past — but not this time. This time, I paid the price for being a perfectionist and attempting to *help* a the Sioux Empire.

Basically, the Sioux had located "B" city only two squares away from "A" city. The radi were horribly interlocking — right up to each city's city limits. Since "B" city was only size 2, I destroyed the Sioux unit there (via "cheat" menu), put in a barbarian unit, then used one of my units to destroy the "barbarian" city. At that point, I went back and created a veteran engineer for the Sioux and located it it PROPERLY so the new city would be more realistic, in terms of gameplay.

Somehow, the Sioux took that as an attack on them. After calling my empire a minor province of their empire, they let loose. Not so much damage, but I was so PO'd at that point I lost it. Killed every civilization via "cheat" and ended up with a pyrhhic "Nazca the Just" rating.

Whatever. Talk about irony.

Anyway, I've done this many times before and this was the *first* time the AI had ever taken it as an attack by my empire on it. It just threw me into a tizzy — as indicated in my original post .

Probably just dumb of me to even aid the AI, but I'm looking for REALISM in my scenario/games.

CYBERAmazon

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Resistance is futile. Lower your shields and disable your weapons. You will be assimilated into the Borg Collective.

[Gatekeeper]

Mad Monk:

**LOL** It's sorely tempting to do just that sometimes. Can't though ... if I want that type of game, I simply play at the Chieftain level. Fairly good stress reliever at that level of play.

BTW, I've created a pair of customized units (airship and elite corps) that allow one to kick butt in the ancient and modern eras, respectively. AI gets to use them, too, though .

CYBERAmazon

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Resistance is futile. Lower your shields and disable your weapons. You will be assimilated into the Borg Collective.

[Gatekeeper]

Venger:

Take it like a man? Bwa-hahahaha! **cough** Ahem. Actually, I do most of the time. Other times the AI has really PO'd me, I've simply created 100 nuclear missiles and taken out every AI city on Earth.

This go-around just annoyed the hell out of me for some reason. Probably because I wasn't expecting it (see my reply to Mao). Basically, I ended up losing because now I have to re-start a new game.

**sigh** Nukes are definitely more joyous at ending the AI's aspirations. The "kill civilization" option in the "cheat" menu sometimes is, um, too sanitized .

AI doesn't really improve, huh? Doesn't surprise me. That kind of work would require re-releasing the game after a bunch of work at the source level. I play the Macintosh version of Civ II and Civ II Gold. The latter version has a terrible habit of crashing upon exiting the application. Brian Nesse was never able to figure out a solution to that, short of eradicating the MP part of the game to get at the problem.

CYBERAmazon

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Resistance is futile. Lower your shields and disable your weapons. You will be assimilated into the Borg Collective.

[cavebear]

Cyber - I can certainly empathize with your frustration. The AI needs fewer shields to build units and Wonders, it always knows where everything is, it can always get whatever it wants (treaties, techs) from othe AI civs, etc.

It was only just recently that I discovered that it will even create units out of thin air! One went to war with my, attacking an outlying city. It took most of my accumulated and delivered defensive units to save it from Tanks, and an arriving Fighter squadron discovered a column of the damn things coming at me. On investigating further, I found an ENDLESS column of them.

After a while, in frustration, I opened a saved file in cheat mode. The AI was building Tanks in 3 cities, each one taking 4 turns. So, that was less than 1 Tank per turn. Yet I was destroying 2 or 3 each turn and the column never got smaller!

What's the point of playing a game like that?

I think playing the AI has made me worse in playing against humans!

[Gatekeeper]

Cavebear:

Who knows with the AI. Personally, I haven't encountered the "unlimited army" you described — then again, I play the Macintosh version, so maybe it got fixed. Referring back to my first sentence, I think it's impossible to predict the AI production pattern once it's declared war on you.

I've seen AI cities (over a dozen more than once) sitting in "Capitalization" mode, almost like the AI's waiting for something to happen. Usually a war with you or another AI. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if the AI then switched the "Capitalization" cities back into production. In my case, that meant 12 divisions of armor bearing down on me that hadn't been there the previous turn.

Ouch.

CYBERAmazon

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Resistance is futile. Lower your shields and disable your weapons. You will be assimilated into the Borg Collective.

[SilverDragon]

What about the horesmen that can bribe your units?

[Chainsaw]

MY opinion about the cheating AI:
If the AI wouldnt cheat, what would be the point? One would ALWAYS win in SP, no chance of even a trace of resistance. In my opinion, the AI should be more clever, instead of a cheater. For example more consequent in a war, bulding MANY units, attacking in larger numbers at once, dont offer peace after losing a city or after conquering just some of your cities...this list could go on for a long time.
The AI has to cheat, because it doesnt act just slightly intelligent.

[shmily_dana]

I had a game where the AI discovered armor and suddenly attack with 5 tanks and only had 3 cities on the island. The AI did not have the cash to rush build these tanks. Inspection in cheat mode of the AI cities revealed partially built units in all cities.

My rule is if I catch the AI cheating (it has to be real obvious) I get to delete AI units in the cheat menu. I consider this the same as when I played checkers with my cousin and he would try to sneak pieces on the board if he was losing.

[Steve Clark]

Whatsa matter, can't beat the AI? Instead of coming here pissed off, learn the ways of beating them at their own game. Come on, there are a number of people here purposely handicap themselves just to get some semblance of a challenge against the AI. If they can win by building one city in the polar region, what does it say for the rest of us? For me, I wish the AI would 'cheat' more just to provide more of a challenge in the early game.

And don't get me started on 'realism'.

[Bohlen]

Hmmmm...CA, you are upset that the AI "cheated" after you yourself used the cheat menu? Maybe there was an electronic crackle coming from your Mac that you didn't hear. Maybe the AI said, "Human players are pieces of crap cheating hunks of living sh*t!!!! I'm so PO'd right now at this guy I can't see straight! Damn f*cking thing ruined an entire damn game! An AI shouldn't have to save every damn turn to prevent f*cking human cheating!" Now that would be irony.

Seriously though, I have seen the AI "cheat" several times to keep the game even. I understand that the production boxes are smaller, that is understandable, but when a city builds 12 city improvements in one turn after I just destroyed them all (including city walls), now that is cheating. I feel your pain. I just expect the cheating anymore. The AI will try and screw you if you don't get a civ under control early enough.

[Oldman]

Yeah i second that Steve!! I am just playing through occ5, where you have one square of land for you one city!!! and i'm thrashing 6 other civs on deity, but i'm still not going to beat paul or huey AC landing time!!! And i'm seriously not that good?!?!

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Oldman,

"There are not more than 5 musical notes..." - Sun Tzu
"There are not more than 5 primary colours..." - Sun Tzu
"There are not more than 5 cardinal tatses..." - Sun Tzu

and we build an Academy for this guy...