Tired the AI is cheating threads

A simple definition of cheating:

If I lose my opponent obviously cheated.

Another definition"

If I lose, I didn't cheat hard enough.

There's a regrettable amount of drama going on about this, but I think most of us understand the real point: People have seen the AI do things that would not be possible for the player (ie get Space Militarization before anyone had Battle Armor), and they would like the matter investigated. If it's a bug they would like it fixed. If not, they would like to understand why the AI is behaving in such a manner (even if it's just something perfectly normal that they didn't notice at first). No need to mention the word "cheat", as it is quite tiresome on the ears of the developers.

I haven't noticed any such behavior in my own games, but I am very curious about the stuff others have reported. I hope the anomalies can be investigated without accusations being tossed about.

The Drengin, Yor and Torians express their hatred for being called cheaters here:

http://www.galciv.com/forum.asp?BID=GF&id=66082#66263

I have noticed AI's getting tech without the
prequisites, AI's having impulse drive when the only ai's
with cold fusion didnt have impulse(ie couldnt have gotten
it in trade).


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I can see why people might suspect a cheat if they don't understand why something happened, particularly if they are new to the game.

I only acquired this game three days ago and started a game on fool difficulty level. I was actually wondering if the AI gave the human player some "cheats" at that level because good things kept happening that I really needed. I was in a frightful financial hole and I get the message "A Huge Drengin starship has arrived with exotic goods giving you an extra income of 7bc per turn". More such starships arrived and AI players were giving me money "to recognise my benevolence". Later I discovered the Drengin were sending freighters to me and I too could send out freighters. I also later realised the AI were giving me "protection money" because my military was much larger then theirs (I had about 8 little ships but they had next to nothing because they were all fighting one another). No cheats, good.

Hey Staffa,
Yeah, I saw that in an earlier post, I think that is being considered a bug and being looked at.

The problem with the over use of the word 'cheat' is because whether the behavior is intentional or not, it is technically cheating when the AIs get to demand more money than you have in your treasury and research techs without the pre-reqs.

The catch is that using the word cheat in this context then brings up the defensiveness in the devs too used to seeing it used in the thread from the yahoo who plays the game for all of three hours and declares it's cheating because how else could the Torians have 3 colony ships on turn 2.

For those of us merely interested in tracking down bugs in the game, it probably would do us better to try and avoid the word 'cheat' to avoid any confusion. On the other hand, it would be nice if the devs didn't automatically set the phasers to annihilate every time they see the letters c-h-e-a-t in a legitimate thread about anomalous AI behavior.

So because you cant demand more money then the AI has
in their treasury, while they can demand more then you
have, they are 'cheating'?

Hum, thats a rather odd perspective, why dont you
pretend that you can demand more money then they have
but that they always will refuse. Same difference in
the end.

Hey Peter Harris,
Good game isn't it. All the trading is part of the game. The further away the trade planet, from your system from which your freightor is created, the more income from trade you generate.

Someone should write up a FAQ and get it stickied. "The AI has greater population than me, is it cheating?" "It's impossible for the Dregnin to have that much money! They must be cheating!" "The Caronids couldn't possibly have researched and built a trade good that early in the game!" et cetera ad nauseum. All have simple answers but they get asked over and over again.

And if the board was no longer flooded by newbies complaining about cheats, it might make our otherwise wonderful devs more receptive when a real concern shared by experienced gamers comes up, such as the techs without prerequisites issue.

Staffa: you can demand more than the AI has in its treasury by typing in the amount instead of using the slider.

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J4

Yes, it is an excellent game. The trade is good. In my first game I just sent my first two freighters to the nearest AI system, not the best idea. Umh, the Drengin loved me for it though!

Great, now conquer all races, then go after the Drengin!!

Staffa, it's a cheat/bug because it does more than violate the rules: it breaks the game and there is no reason to believe it was intentional. First, this behavior was introduced without documentation in one of the patches. Two, in spite of having been brought up numerous times, the devs have never addressed it as either intentional or bug. Three, Brad insisted as of today the behavior doesn't exist (sure, Brad, whatever you say). Four, I have had no choice but to lose the game numerous times because I'm put in a situation of going to war against an AI or shutting down my production for months to even years.

Sorry, it's a bug/cheat until someone in charge says otherwise. If you can't recall that it NEVER used to happen, that's not my fault.

Vincible, it resets to the current value of the AI's treasury if you try that. Why do people keep saying you can when you can't?

Yes, I read a lot of cheating threads from people who obviously want to run before learning how to crawl. But I also see some cases where experienced players on this board try to say "Hey, there is a problem here" and don't get anywhere fast with it.

I usually take that delay as normal operating procedure. It does take time to hear the complaints, weigh the evidence, decide if there really is a problem and where it is placed on the list of fixes. Rather than make us all wait days or weeks before someone in charge makes any proclamations about it, sometimes an interim answer is given. But it may not be the final answer.

Ack, you're right, I'm wrong. I probably got that impression because you can adjust the "months" slider past 50 by typing in a number. And also because everyone else said it But really I should check these things before mouthing off on the forum

A "cheat" is anything the AI can do functionally that you can't. A production bonus isn't something it's "doing"; it's a static advantage that is assigned to it via the difficulty level. Knowing where yellow stars are, or researching techs without the proper prerequisites, or knowing where anomalies are, or being able to ask for money from someone beyond what their treasury supports... THOSE are "cheats". But being able to calculate moves faster or deeper than the typical human isn't cheating; we could do it, it would just take a lot longer. There may be a piece of of the code with a "FindNearestColonizeablePlanet" routine that the AI uses to send out transports. While humans don't have access to such a calculation, you could nevertheless figure it out manually, so this isn't really a cheat either. (Although it would be a nice feature if we could automatically determine the distance between the current selected item and any other point on the map.)

Bruce

A cheat is when a player doesn't play by the rules. Rules are usually explained at the beginning of the game. For instance, the ai sees all yelllow stars. You are told so. So it doesn't cheat, it gets an advantage. You get a big econ bonus against the ai on subnormal. You don't cheat, you just get an advantage.

Then when an ai researches techs without prerequisites, or demands 1200bc when you have -300, you can word it as 'cheat' and suppose it is intentional, or as 'bug'. Better call it a bug.

Bruce,

I don't necessarily disagree with your definition, but using it means that virtually every computer game ever made "cheats"; so what's the point of complaining about this particular game's AI "cheating?"

Also, like I said in my original post, if we had $100 million dollar computers to run our games on, then maybe having the AI calculate the minutia of everything would be practical, but as far as knowing where yellow stars and resources are, I think SD has made the right choice. Unlike most other 4X games, I don't have to sit and wait for 60 seconds while the computer plods through move calculations. The "cheat" is documented and part of the backstory, so I don't consider it cheating.

As for getting techs without prerequisites, this is obviously a bug and I hope SD is looking into the problem.

You're quite right in that virtually every computer game ever made cheats. So why complain about GalCiv? Three reasons:

1. Galciv has somehow gotten a reputation for outstanding AI. But when you found out that some of it might be due to cheats that even some other games don't do, it rings a little hollow. We *want* the game to be have great AI, so we'd like these cheats eliminated.

2. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people got the impression that the game doesn't cheat, period. Thus, it's worth setting the record straight that it does, in fact, cheat, but not too much, and some of those might actually be bugs which will be fixed. By accepting the word cheat, discussions which start out "The AI cheats! It's doing X!" can be calmly responded with "Hmm, you're right, it shouldn't be doing X. We'll fix that." rather than "You're a dumb idiot the AI never cheats if it does X then live with it."

3. Some cheats are simply so eggregious and noticeable that they break a player's since of fairness. Given that there are plenty of more acceptable ways to give the AI an advantage (production bonuses, income bonuses, etc.) if needed for it to be competitive, there really shouldn't be a *need* to let the AI research different techs, or know what worlds to colonize, etc. It's the difference between a AA pitcher pitching against Barry Bonds -- sure, Barry Bonds has a lot of advantages, but at least they are playing the same game -- and letting Barry Bonds bat 9 times in a row.
Bruce

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Well said LDiCesare!

Peter, you can cancel those routes anytime you like in the trade screen (Domestic Policy -> Trade)

Yeah I'm playing with all AI on Beginner and I also had a big boon early in the game. I had fallen behind technologically while building Diplomatic Translators and at the first UP meeting a vote was made to give races with less tech 4 of them for free. Woohoo!

Aside: the thing that I find amusing about the oft complaining about the AI knowing where the yellow stars are is that without this we'd be complaining about what a bunch of idiots the AI was. Brad or someone can correct me, but I've always assumed this was a kludge to get the AI to colonise efficiently without trying to program and tweak the code to have the AI make the decisions about where to send its colony ships.

If me, with my actually intelligent brain, spends time looking at the overall pattern of the map and making difficult and subtle decisions about where to send each valuable colony ship, I can only imagine what a headache this would have been to program well. So, instead you just give the AI this little bit of knowledge, and it colonises like an intelligent player instead of a monkey hurling crap at targets.

That would have been our illustrious leader, Brad, giving that impression

The official claim was that other than economic bonuses on Genius and above and the yellow stars thingee, the AI was playing by exact same rules you were. Now, since the release, they've altered that definition to include the: AI handles human-AI diplomacy differently because you humans are a treacherous lot.

But that's it.

Anything else the AI is doing that you can't is a violation of the claimed state of the game and rules. Since I know this aspect of the AI was a huge selling point for me, I expect it to be true.

We can call it a bug, we can call it a cheat, but that's pretty much just arguing semantics. So long as we aren't calling it a "soul wrenching betrayal by those (insert profanity here) devs that ripped me off of my hard earned money butt reaming", both sides of the fence should be able to get along.

I think we can call it "some people need a life."

The AI diplomacy issue wasn't "added" in the sense that it was overlooked. It has been added over time because humans were exploiting AI diplomacy and hence the diplomacy AI has had to slowly be re-designed to treat human players differently than AI players. But it is still playing the same game as the human player is.

The problem I and others object to is this obsessive absolute thinking that goes into this. I'll say what I've said before: The only reason the AI in GalCiv doesn't cheat is because it wasn't necessary to do so. If it was necessary to make the AI cheat flagrantly to maek the game more fun, then it would do so. I personally don't consider the diplomacy AI to be "cheating".

But if someone else wants to consider the diplomacy AI having to be modified to handle human cheese tactics and what not to be "Cheating" then that's certainly their perogative.

That said, it is a shame that some people are obsessing over this kind of stuff and would, if they could, hijack the development schedule so that this stuff could be "Fixed". We have X development resources available to spend on GalCiv after release. How many of them should we spend sifting through say the diplomacy AI for the AI to AI transfers to make it behave identical in both cases even though 99% of players won't notice the difference? How much time should be spent to trace through the tech paths to make sure that some low level tech doesn't have a buglet that only .01% of the population would notice (and one that even we didn't notice)?

At the end of the day, the real question is, which expansion pack features should we remove to look into this? Rally points maybe? Maybe a few random events?

There is always a tendancy by developers, myself included, to want to please the really hard core players. But doing so excessively would be to the detriment of the general playing population.

The AI plays by the same rules as the human player does except for these things:
a) The AI knows where the stars are located and what color they are (they don't know what the planet classes are however)
The AI knows where the resources are (they're based on the star class)
c) At Genius and Incredible level the AI gets more ability points and economic power.
d) The human player is treated differently in diplomacy/trading (in 1.0 they were treated the same but by 1.04 they have slightly different behaviors now).

Anything else is a bug.

~SDC~