1.29f AI Observations

[DeepO]

I don't get it. From the one hand you have people complaining that the AI is no good, from the other those who think the AI cheats all the time. In this case, fittstim, you are probably right: The AI knows, AFAIK, the defense of cities, or at least the top defender that is in it. But who cares? Humans have tons of advantages over any AI, so give them some slack.

Note that dac's example does not specifically call for that: if a galley just passed the city, it would have seen that there was a spearman defending. The next galley can drop of its troops next to the city. As dac said, normally emptying out a city makes all the units go towards that city, but it doesn't anymore in 1.29f. So that would be a reason to believe that the AI is not all-knowing what troops are concerned.

Really, I'm getting fed up with all the AI cheat stuff floating on the board. The humans cheat enough as it is: they are way too intelligent (well at least most are) to play this game, the AI constantly has to try to battle the odds. And whenever an AI does something well, tries another tactic, it gets analysed, picked apart, and receives a counter strategy on this board within weeks. Which the humans can learn again, further tilting the balance in their advantage. The AIs of all the Civ games should be the ones complaining that they don't get enough advantages, not the other way around.

/end of rant

DeepO

[dac]

DeepO & fittstim,

this was exactly my point. Prior to 1.29f, the AI did cheat, it did know which city in your empire had the weakest (or no) defense. This made it absurdly easy to manipulate. I would have a SoD invade my empire, which I'd respond to by moving a defender out of a city waaaay on the other side of the empire. The SoD would then head for that city, bypassing all else. While I whittled it away with cannon, horsies, knights, etc. I suspect that in 1.29f it will not work that way, since the AI, instead of abandoning its assault on my now well defended town to attack the undefended one farther away, continued it's assault. I consider that a bonus since this way you may actually lose a few cities to the SoD while you desperately try to whittle it down to size.

The post was originally intended to see if anybody else had better evidence than I had that the AI behavior really had changed in 1.29f.

It definitely does create more offensive units now. Wars with the AI used to consist of one 'pulse' of offensive units, then wading in and mopping up all the defenders it built. Now the AI continues to build offensive troops, making the 'stop the rush, then attack' tactic not so good.

I've been pleased by what I've seen, but it's only from one game, so I don't know if I just got lucky with a fun setup, or if the AI is behaving differently.

[DeepO]

dac, I doubt it that that 'cheat' was taken from the AI in 1.29f. If it was, we would have seen a serious degradation of AI performance, and I haven't seen that. No, I can only guess that it has gotten a bit more determination: if the archer+spearman went out to attack that city, they would do it, even if it was later a bit reinforced. Where previously you could yo-yo them around between two cities, as long as you shifted your defense between the two.

However, I don't think that that is the specific behaviour. What did happen is that now the AI will attack what is next to him, ignoring baits some tiles away. It was a small change, which would work in this case, but in other case is just as exploitable. Why I think this? Well, the yo-yoing of troops is very visible in the Alamo scenario, in that you have two chokepoints. Lower the defense on one side will mean all the troops go for that point. Lowering it on the other, and all troops go after that. So they still are baited... however, when an AI troop is in your territory, it will not retreat when damaged, but will attack whatever is directly beside him (in their own territory, damaged AI troops will most of the times retreat home to heal). As far as I've seen it so far, undamaged troops will go for their initial target, which can just as well be on the other side of your territory. But once they arrive there, they won't lose their focus that easily as in 1.21f.

But, I haven't seen enough AI attacks on my territory yet in 1.29 to really comment on this. Most of the times, the attacks were on their territory, where the AI will behave differently.

DeepO

[Barchan]

Originally posted by DeepO
Really, I'm getting fed up with all the AI cheat stuff floating on the board. The humans cheat enough as it is: they are way too intelligent (well at least most are) to play this game, the AI constantly has to try to battle the odds. And whenever an AI does something well, tries another tactic, it gets analysed, picked apart, and receives a counter strategy on this board within weeks. Which the humans can learn again, further tilting the balance in their advantage. The AIs of all the Civ games should be the ones complaining that they don't get enough advantages, not the other way around.

And, as if that isn't bad enough, when the AI finally *does* something clever or gets really lucky, the human player can always reload the turn and change his strategy to foil the AI's move and/or luck! (Oh, please, of course it happens; why else would people complain about the random number generator seed?) Can you imagine if the AI could do that to the human player?

You spot the enemy's capital, defended only by a Spearman while a Pikeman loiters adjacent to it. You attack and capture the city, chuckling at the AI's blunder. Then you get the message: The AI is loading Autosave 670AD. You watch helplessly as the AI turn progresses and he moves the Pikeman safely into the city. On your turn, your forces crumble against the tougher defender. D'oh!

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by Barchan
You spot the enemy's capital, defended only by a Spearman while a Pikeman loiters adjacent to it. You attack and capture the city, chuckling at the AI's blunder. Then you get the message: The AI is loading Autosave 670AD. You watch helplessly as the AI turn progresses and he moves the Pikeman safely into the city. On your turn, your forces crumble against the tougher defender. D'oh!

Hehe, good thing I turn off autosaves... waste of HD space.

[DeepO]

Barchan, that would be a supercool feature: give the AIs one reload possibility per game where he can fool the evil humans

DeepO

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by Thrawn05
Hehe, good thing I turn off autosaves... waste of HD space.

You must have a very small HD. Since those autosaves take less than 5Megs, in the event of system crash or power failure, those autosaves may come in handy.

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by Moonsinger


You must have a very small HD. Since those autosaves take less than 5Megs, in the event of system crash or power failure, those autosaves may come in handy.

I have a 15GB on my P3 550, and a 30GB on my P4m 1.6.

If you look at most other games, their save don't add up like those in civ3, and I applaud Firaxis for the compression. But when they stoped it in 1.29f I bashed them for it. Heaven forbid we need to wait another second or two before our next turn.

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by Thrawn05
I have a 15GB on my P3 550, and a 30GB on my P4m 1.6.

If you look at most other games, their save don't add up like those in civ3, and I applaud Firaxis for the compression. But when they stoped it in 1.29f I bashed them for it. Heaven forbid we need to wait another second or two before our next turn.

You could just reduce the number of autosaves....