AI caught cheating

[Isle]

Sorry a little explaination: Ofcouse in civ2 improvement cheating wasnt nearly as obvious, but I have found AI cities with a small island nearby. Where the island was irrigated before the invention of map making.

[Fromage]

Could someone post a screenshot or a save game file, so I could see how AI cheats. Atleast I haven't seen anything in four games.

[Ludwig]

SoHappy -

The AI is not exempt from the resource requirement. I wondered about this too, because I was having troubling finding the resources I wanted to steal from the AI...but if you can't see the resource, one of three things is probably true:

1. The resource is on a tile the AI built a city on. The resources are placed during the map creation phase, so there's nothing preventing them from popping up under cities once they become visible.

2. The AI built a mine on it. Many of the resources become EXTREMELY hard to see when the tile containing them is mined.

3. You are just missing it in your review. This is not a flame, the darned things can be really hard to see under fog of war.

#2 and #3 can be greatly ameliorated by downloading one of the mod files that attachs lettered flags to the resources to make them more noticeable. I have found my enjoyment of the resource system greatly enhanced by a simple download to change the graphic. The mod will work on your saved games, too, so if you download it now you can use it in your current game.

For #1 you can try hitting Shift-M [I believe]. This is supposed to remove all cities and improvements from the map to let you see the underlying terrain. In conjunction with the label mod this should enable you to see where the AI is hiding his saltpetre.

Actually, I just thought of a 4th and a 5th option.

#4. The AI HAD saltpetre, and used it to manufacture a lot of gunpowder units, and then the saltpetre deposit was exhausted. He still gets to keep the units he built, and gets to finish any units in his queue, even with the resource gone.

#5. The AI got saltpetre by trading with another AI. The trade may still be current, or it may have lapsed. If current it should show up on the foreign advisor screen. If lapsed, the rules in #4 apply.

[Cian McGuire]

Psiwar-

There are three kinds of water hexes in the game- coast, sea, and ocean. There are no 'Lake' or 'Freshwater' hexes in this game. All interior bodies of water not connected to the main body is considered freshwater- even though they are still called 'Coast'. In the second screenshot one cannot view the terrain surrounding the lake, but going by the first there is no connection between that one-hex lake and the body of water to the south.

Now, what the AI can do, and you can too- is build mines over old irrigated squares. Hence the lack of irrigation at #7 NW above Moscow, and the 2 hexes directly south of Minsk. They were irrigated at some point in time but then replaced with mines to increase production.

Also, cities now act as irrigated squares, unlike Civ 2- you can have a body of water connected to your city, then irrigate from that.

[TCO]

Re: AI caught cheating

Originally posted by Psiwar
I only play in regent level because i like no cheats either against or for the AI.

This is probably just a carryover from Civ2. In Civ2, the AI settlers could irrigate anywhere. It was just something that the AI needed becuase it was too hard to think through gettting water otherwise. There are other "cheats" that carry over from Civ2. for instance, the AI plays with the entire map revealed. He only "scouts" becuase they wrote a subroutine to do this so that the human player can see it. But the AI always knows where your units and cities are. It's just too hard for the AI to be competetive without some of these cheats.

[TCO]

Originally posted by NZrevenge
If the computer cheats, then atleast it's fair. In my first few games, back when I still trusted the fully automated workers, I noticed things like this happening in my own territory as well.

This leads me to believe that either I am very unobservant, or there is a bug in the automated worker AI...

Y'all: don't get exercised. The same thing happened in civ2. The AI could irrigate anywhere and so could you...if you auto-settlered.

[Venger]

Re: Re: AI caught cheating

Originally posted by GP

There are other "cheats" that carry over from Civ2. for instance, the AI plays with the entire map revealed. He only "scouts" becuase they wrote a subroutine to do this so that the human player can see it. But the AI always knows where your units and cities are. It's just too hard for the AI to be competetive without some of these cheats.

This doesn't have to be this way - the AI does not need to have the map revealed, in fact, each AI player should have his own unique known map set. While the game system needs to know the entire map, any AI routine should check against that AI's known map.

Venger

[FrostyBoy]

using my graphics, good boy

[TCO]

Easier said than done

They tried this in CTP and the AI had major problems being competetive.

If they come up with much smarter AI, this is definitly the way to go (agreed) as "cheats" tend to ruin the atmosphere. But at the current time this is "easier said than done" because of the complexity of the game.

[Venger]

Hmmm...I would think that it'd not be too hard to have each Civilization have it's own map. Has Firaxis come out and said that every AI opponent knows the whole world? If so, why do they want to trade maps or value my map? That doesn't make sense.

Venger

[TCO]

(a)Venger,

You can give each AI it's own map. But then you need to have smarter AI's that can think more like a human or the game will suffer. It's an open question as to wether that can be done yet. If it can, great. But not an easy task...

The AI trades maps for the same reason as sending out scout units: it's programmed to do so to add to your sense of immersion and to give you the false impression that the AI doesn't know the whole map. But it gets no benefit from either receiving maps or from scout units.

I'm not making this up. This is a very well-known facet of how Civ2 works. Soren (Firaxis AI designer) confirmed that this is also the case in Civ3.

[Venger]

Originally posted by GP
(a)Venger,

I'm not making this up. This is a very well-known facet of how Civ2 works. Soren (Firaxis AI designer) confirmed that this is also the case in Civ3.

I knew Civ2 had this, but figured with map trading Civ3 knew better...sigh...

Venger

[Elucidus]

So how do you explain that the AIs don't make a mad dash for my terrain until I give them my map. Or at least that is how it's been so far.

[Sevorak]

Elucidus,

It looks like settling does have a restriction to "explored" terrain. Other things, however, don't, like how AI ships half a world away will set sail as soon as a Privateer leaves your harbour, or how their galleys, caravels and frigates have an unerring ability to track your submarines. Similarly, going for your least-defended (or even undefended) cities - an early post on the Strategy forum showed how you could keep an AI force at bay by alternately covering and uncovering two large coastal cities. The AI force would sail toward the undefended city, and when you uncovered the defended city and railed its forces to the undefended city, it would turn around and sail for the previously defended (now undefended) city - even when OUT of visual range. In this way, you could keep AI forces sailing up and down a fairly long coast.

-Sev

[TCO]

Originally posted by Elucidus
So how do you explain that the AIs don't make a mad dash for my terrain until I give them my map. Or at least that is how it's been so far.

Same as Sevorak said. Plus, I'd ask you. How does it compare to Civ2? In terms of AI map cheat? Don't really know too much about the settling issue.