Why are people so quick to bandy around the term "cheat"?

[trickey]

I dont care if people restart, or whatever they do with the game. The thing that gets would get me mad, is if they began braggin about how good they did that game or something.

[Wormwood]

Originally posted by Thrawn05
I don't restart, but I don't care if other people reload games.

I only save in stragety games only because of the complexity and the fact it take time.

First person shooters like AvPGE, QII, and JK just for a quick example I never save. If I die I want to start from the start again.

Sounds like you should try roguelike games.

[Barchan]

Originally posted by trickey
I dont care if people restart, or whatever they do with the game. The thing that gets would get me mad, is if they began braggin about how good they did that game or something.

Exactly. If I want to play the "perfect" game or I need to reload to correct a blunder, that's one thing. But it's another thing entirely to save before every combat or goody hut and keep reengineering the turn until it's optimal and then later crow about how you're such the "1337 d33t33 b33t3r" (or whatever). Unless you can take a starting position and play it out, without ever turning back, you really shouldn't be too quick to climb to the rooftop to shout out your score....

[notyoueither]

Cheating AI?

Oh for frucks sakes, not this again.

Say after me... h-a-n-d-i-c-a-p. Once more with feeling. HANDICAP!

If you want to play even, play Regent. Learn to blow it away, it's too easy. So just like you give your niece or nephew an advantage to make the game interesting you give them an advantage, or in other words... you handicap yourself.

The only 'cheat' has been confirmed by Soren. The AI sees the whole map. That's it. If you can't overcome that, then he's done a pretty fantastic job.

[frostycreep]

I think the AI needs to cheat in order to make harder levels a challenge. I dont think its possible to make the AI so intelligent that it thinks like a human, therefore on harder levels it needs to cheat. I see nothing wrong with this as im satisfied with the challenge im faced with on harder levels.

[Coracle]

First of all, the AI does DUMB things, and we've posted them many times. There is no excuse for an AI so DUMB it sends over and over a settler/foot soldier team heading towards an open tile (resulting from razing) DURING war. I destroyed three of these braindead pairs in a row. And of course the AI was getting freebie settlers.

Why does the AI when on the defensive just build defensive units?? I once attacked China with tanks. They should have had enough cavalry and marines, and some tanks, to offer a nasty counterattack. But there was no counterattack as the stupid AI JUST BUILT DEFENSIVE units. All this proves is Soren knows nothing about strategy and planning.

Must the AI be allowed to magically TELEPORT settlers across my civ in one tuirn to open tiles it should not even know exist? That kind of cheating is intensely irritating.

Take away stupid, sloppy programming, you will, ipso facto, have a "smarter" AI.

At higher levels, let the AI cheat a little, but at least tell us what these cheats are. In Civ 2 at higher levels the odds during combat simply changed. I prefered that to the insidious sneaky cheating the Civ 3 AI does.

[frostycreep]

Then play civ 2.

[TacticalGrace]

The ultimate AI cheat would be for a *computer* player to restart because it got a bad starting position.

[Grumbold]

Whoa, we seem to have gone from talking about the player "cheating" to the AI shortcuts. There's already a live thread on that issue

I'm tending to restart games a lot at the moment just to test out certain theories. For instance, its my current belief that certain player nations not only get situated near their historical neighbours, they also seem to get similar terrain from game to game (assuming you don't go mad wiht the world settings). For instance the Persians have an extremely high tendency to end up next to a mass of jungle. Having just played a game of early jungle clearing I might well restart until I get a truly different starting area. I do not consider that wrong, nor is it violating any rules. There's no law about having to finish any game before starting a new one. I rarely play any Civ game to the final victory since its the striving for dominance I enjoy, not mopping up the last remnants to get recorded on the score sheet.

Using a code to reveal the map and then continuing to play that map with foreknowledge of the location of good city sites and huts is something else, but I still don't have any problem with players who do that if it maximises their enjoyment of the product. After all, in the single player version they could rightly argue that they are only levelling the playing field a little with the AI, who already knows the terrain and additionally knows where all the resources will be.

In the long run, exploiting loopholes in the SP game, whether they be codes, reloads or AI weaknesses is all irrelevant when compared to multiplayer. In fact it makes those players who rely on such exploits easy opponents for those who have learned to play the game clean.

[Qilue]

This is a response to all those who have stated how they are 'professional programmers'.

Considering the bug-riddled state of software these days, I would think anyone would be too ashamed to actually admit to being a 'professional programmer'.

[Grumbold]

There are probably fewer bugs per line of code and there's no such thing as a standard PC any more. Unfortunately each software title has got about a hundred thousand times bigger since I first started playing games and learning how to write programs.

If you're going to write code, you might as well be a professional and get paid for it

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by Qilue
This is a response to all those who have stated how they are 'professional programmers'.

Considering the bug-riddled state of software these days, I would think anyone would be too ashamed to actually admit to being a 'professional programmer'.

I couldn't agree with you more.

I quite two of my jobs because my stupid bosses didn't want a clean cut and good program... they want a program that was done in the speed of "I want it yesterday!".


Coracle: This is the first time I agree with you. I think the end of the world is near.

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by DeepO
Cheating AI... if only people would have the slightest understanding of how intelligent they are themselves, they wold stop complaining on the lesser intelligence of software.

So far, I have yet to see an AI better then the one AvPGE. THe one in Q3/JK2 are nice, but I found them to follow a set path when you compile a map.

Of course, Chess AIs have done pretty good, and perhaps the best ones I've read.

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Qilue
This is a response to all those who have stated how they are 'professional programmers'.

Considering the bug-riddled state of software these days, I would think anyone would be too ashamed to actually admit to being a 'professional programmer'.

Hehe, I used to be an AI programmer (well, technically software engineer), I moved on. But I have yet to hear of any bugs in my products... and I can call them mine because I did more then half of the code on them. The reason why you're seeing bugs is that applications get so big, they become incontrollable. And the rush to market is also quite strong... Plus, there are millions of professional programmers at work, surely you don't imply that I have to feel responsible for some of the mess others are making? I'm still proud of what I did, and until someone tells me that I was wrong somewhere (and proofs it with bugreports an inch thick) I won't change my mind

Thramn05, chess AIs are indeed well done, but you can't compare these to the Civ III AI. (I'm repeating here, but what the heck). Big Blue was an engineering feat, and a big accomplishment in parrallel computing. The algorithms used for decision making, however, were very slim. It simply computed far more possibilities than Kasparov could, without taking any shortcuts or pattern recoginition that most of the times defines the I in AI. On a purely game level, it was worse then some of the available commercial packages (ChessMaster x000, for instance), as these are indeed relatively intelligent.

But even then, you can't compare ChessMaster to Civ. It is a series, which is centered around the AI, not around graphics. As such, it has a long standing evolution of its code (over 10 years), which progressively got improved. Civ III doesn't have this, the programming is far less focused on the AI, and it is a completely new system from both Civ II and SMAC.

Further, the level of complexity in Civ is far greater then a 'simple' chess board with limited moves. Chess is made for humans: the best (Kasparov) can foresee about 17 turns deep what is going to happen, and plan according to that. DeepBlue, through shear CPU power could see 23 turns... in Civ, I can plan ahead some 50-100 turns (inaccurately, of course), while my computer has trouble with 3 of them. So other algorithms are needed, as it is not a simple matter of doing all the possible moves, and judging what the results are. That's whay we need such 'stupid' algorithms that aim for some goal when certain conditions are met. Aiming for empty cities is obvious, but as the humans quickly see through these 'tactics', it becomes an exploit. If you want better strategies and tactics on the AI part, you either need cheats, or a development time of lets say 20 years... which in turn means you don't pay $50 for CivIII, but more like $500.

As to using cheats: everybody does as he pleases. But I object of alotting development time to including cheats, when that will only distract from having a better game in other areas. If I have to give away some of the AI functionalities because someone else has more fun when he can cheat, I think I have the right to give my opinion. So exploiting AI or game mechanic weaknesses: sure, do what you want. A Cheat mode in Civ III: no way!

DeepO

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by Qilue
This is a response to all those who have stated how they are 'professional programmers'.

Considering the bug-riddled state of software these days, I would think anyone would be too ashamed to actually admit to being a 'professional programmer'.

There is nothing to be ashamed of. Unless you are writting a tick-tack-toe program or something, there shall always be bugs! It's as simple as that. In most of my projects, there are millions line of codes to consider. Moreover, not all of those codes are written by me. If the program runs fine for 99.9999999% of the time, that's a big success.

Btw, even a simple (less than 100 lines of code) tick-tack-toe program may not be not free of bug. Does it display? Does it play music? Does it animate? If so, you are probably calling certain Windows API or DirectX functions. Are you sure that those APIs/drivers are bug free? If a bug happens to crash your simple tick-tack- toe program, is it your false? Should you be ashamed of that? I see nothing to be ashamed of; you did your best! Since you can't possibly test your program in all computer systems out there, when bug occurs, you just have to correct it and move on. There are bigger fishes out there to catch, why worry about the little one like that.

IMO, complainers/whiners often miss the big piture. Take civ3 for example, it gives many people countless of enjoyable hours, what is a big deal if it crashes once in a blue moon?