Yet another AI CHEAT - Technology

Encomium · January 23, 2002, 01:39

Five civs. I am the Iroquois. Regent level.

I had changed in the Editor scout movement values to '4', and I managed to luckily get FOUR tech advances from the goody-huts.

I check some other civs early in the game and I am FOUR techs ahead of them, and with a lot more money, too.

FOUR TECHS.

Fourteen turns later, the English come to me, and GET THIS. . .try to SELL ME A TECH!!! They are now one tech AHEAD of me!!

If all four civs worked together and spent every gold in their combined treasuries they couldn't have passed me. Never.

The AI GAVE THEM tech advances after seeing I was "too far" ahead.

This is the same AI that allows various other cheats, such as ocean-going galleys - why exploration is usually done by the time we get caravels.

Firaxis, IT STINKS.

MonsterMan · January 23, 2002, 02:15

I think your arguments are a bit silly. On those difficulty levels, players *want* a challenge. I haven't seen galleys on ocean before that civ invents Navigation - after that, galleys do just fine on the high seas.

MonsterMan · January 23, 2002, 02:19

Btw... did you know that if you discover something no-one else has, you make it cheaper for everyone else to research it? If the 2nd most powerful power after you gets a boost from your lead, they'll discover it faster, and make it even less expensive for the weaker civs to discover it. That can explain things.

DaShi · January 23, 2002, 02:23

AI Civs do like to trade techs like they're going out of style as well.

Encomium · January 23, 2002, 02:38

Quote:

Originally posted by MonsterMan
Btw... did you know that if you discover something no-one else has, you make it cheaper for everyone else to research it? If the 2nd most powerful power after you gets a boost from your lead, they'll discover it faster, and make it even less expensive for the weaker civs to discover it. That can explain things.

Is is AMAZING how many True Believers there are out there trying to find excuses for Civ III.

Those civs would have had to move at a rate of a new tech advance every three turns to have passed me. I watched this carefully as I deliberately increaed the scouts' MP's to get those goody-huts and see if I could maintain my scientific superiority. I didn't. And I had a four tech superioty over everyone, with 180 gold in my treasury. The highest treasury total for my rival was 12. And my civ was as big or bigger than most. Remember this was early in the game when there were no seven turn tech advances; research took a long time. BUT THEY QUICKLY PASSED ME!

There is NO explanation except that the AI gave out free techs to keep the game "even" or keep itself in the game.

That is unacceptable to me.

Galleys?? At NO time should they survive in oceans. And I saw them in oceans after I spent a lot of time building the Lighthouse. The AI apparently needs neither the Lighthouse or Magellan's. I spotted once a German galley in the northern Pacific Ocean while playing a realistic starting locations scenario. Even the World Map the German sold me showed there was no way his galley could have gottgen there from a German port (too much black).

So THE AI CHEATS, and the above are just two examples.

A "challenge"?? I want a smarter AI, level to level. Not one that CHEATS and breaks its own rules, and does ILLOGICAL and silly things. That is no "challenge"; that is making a mockery of the game and wasting my time.

Dis · January 23, 2002, 02:40

what they do is combine research efforts. 1 civ concentrates on 1 branch. Another a second branch etc. They share techs and surpass you.

simple really

MonsterMan · January 23, 2002, 02:46

Quote:

Originally posted by Dissident
what they do is combine research efforts. 1 civ concentrates on 1 branch. Another a second branch etc. They share techs and surpass you.

simple really

You would think so

Mannamagnus · January 23, 2002, 05:03

What if all the other four civs also popped several goody huts and got tech from it? If they would trade the tech as soon as they got it each civ only needs to get one tech from a goody hut.

achtungpanzer · January 23, 2002, 05:39

Quote:

Originally posted by Encomium
Five civs. I am the Iroquois. Regent level.

I had changed in the Editor scout movement values to '4', and I managed to luckily get FOUR tech advances from the goody-huts.

I check some other civs early in the game and I am FOUR techs ahead of them, and with a lot more money, too.

FOUR TECHS.

Fourteen turns later, the English come to me, and GET THIS. . .try to SELL ME A TECH!!! They are now one tech AHEAD of me!!

If all four civs worked together and spent every gold in their combined treasuries they couldn't have passed me. Never.

The AI GAVE THEM tech advances after seeing I was "too far" ahead.

This is the same AI that allows various other cheats, such as ocean-going galleys - why exploration is usually done by the time we get caravels.

Firaxis, IT STINKS.

It make me

when I here such silly rantings - what proof have you ? saved games ? I bet you havnt !

Firstly research gets cheaper as more civs have the research (hence others complain of AI civs "trading" techs in there turn

), other civs can pick up tech from goodie huts and if they have scouts they will have movement 4 as well. I have never seen a galley before it was appropriate (post patch of course). Since you are playing Regent and are obviously finding it a bit hard why not try the really easy levels? how about CTP2 (or if that is too easy try noughts and crosses

)

Martin Gühmann · January 23, 2002, 05:49

Quote:

Originally posted by achtungpanzer
Maybe changing the message from messagebox to alertbox could solve the problem.

Of course you mean unmodded CTP2 that is actually Civ3.5 with mods you upgrade to Civ4.

I had a hard time to compete in techs in my GoddMod. So you can upgrade to Civ4 or still loose with Civ2.5.

-Martin

s3d · January 23, 2002, 06:00

Well, in my mod I struggling hard to _make_ adavntage for AI, so the game wouldn be won at the beginning industrial age

dix2der · January 23, 2002, 06:01

I haven't noticed that AI obtains "free" techs to match your advance, but in a way it is certain that the AI cheats. We've noticed with a friend of mine that the others civs always attack the weaker spots of your empires - for example the last city where you haven't upgraded your two spearmen to pikemen. I know it's possible to do investigation, but not on all the cities.

But you know, that's not a reason to hate the game: the AI can't be as efficient as a player and Firaxis had to find ways to balance powers. Sometimes, when things are really going bad, you can reload, not the AI

When in the tournament party, just after the destruction of the last russian city, Moscow re-appeared from nowhere with three spearman, a settler and a group of two spearman / two archers, despite my blocade of the mountains to not let them go through, I first became green, then I told myself "Gosh, this IS a challenge"

Keep playing!

Martin Gühmann · January 23, 2002, 06:10

Quote:

Originally posted by dix2der
But you know, that's not a reason to hate the game: the AI can't be as efficient as a player and Firaxis had to find ways to balance powers. Sometimes, when things are really going bad, you can reload, not the AI

Of course the AI can be made more efficient. But you won't find a perfect AI in commercial product really. They want to make a lot of mony with a minimum of resources. So they have to find an compromiss. But to skip ZOCs and stacks is a bad compromiss as already someone has it implemented in a far better game.

-Martin

Libertarian · January 23, 2002, 06:38

Quote:

When in the tournament party, just after the destruction of the last russian city, Moscow re-appeared from nowhere with three spearman, a settler and a group of two spearman / two archers, despite my blocade of the mountains to not let them go through, I first became green, then I told myself "Gosh, this IS a challenge"

[...Stuart Smalley voice...]

Now, look in the mirror and repeat after me. I deserve it. Because I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggonit, people like me.

achtungpanzer · January 23, 2002, 07:14

Quote:

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann

Of course you mean unmodded CTP2 that is actually Civ3.5 with mods you upgrade to Civ4.

I had a hard time to compete in techs in my GoddMod. So you can upgrade to Civ4 or still loose with Civ2.5.

-Martin

CTP2 is a nice looking game but its unbalanced by the "army" principle (12 tanks = super weapon) and poor diplomacy. Civ3 is much better (except for not being able to move units in stacks NOT fight as a stack) as the game is more baalnced. I like the corruption/culture flipping as within the bounds of a PC its the best way to model the real life difficulty of invading another nation and absorbing it into your own. Civ2 was very boring in that context.

What makes me

is that there are real bugs in Civ3 and it would be better if these are not confused with those who cannot think beyond Civ2 concepts (invade, invade, never trade techs, get ahead tech wise and never make peace! was my style like many others i am sure). I like having a large but not dominate civ in civ3 where i really would a fight on my hands if all the other civs ganged up on me. Strategic resources and all that tech trading (ie if you are 4 ahead SELL THEM!) make sense and i like not having any coal in my empire as i had to go and get it (remember the Japanese 1941 only 18 months of oil left?). I might try stealing all the oil and watch the other fight me for it...much better than winning yet another city. The lack of ZOC's feels better as well as they have caused me more fights outside of cities - real armies tend to fight in the field!

Flight · January 23, 2002, 07:28

One thing Ive heard no one comment on is the GUI - i just find it a lot easier to use than civ2 or ctp2 - along with the improved aesthetics.

Firaxis has improved some parts of the AI but others could have been better. The AI consistenly uses sneaky strategies to annoy which have no real use when those units could have stopped my total invasion of thier nation. It does some odd things and people did expect more than ever from the AI. People feel cheated that they don't get the intelligence they thought was coming.

dix2der · January 23, 2002, 08:41

CTP2 is a nice looking game but its unbalanced by the "army" principle (12 tanks = super weapon) and poor diplomacy

achtungpanzer: this is totally true, and was a big defaults of all civs. And it's fixed in civ3, a game which is not perfect but far more fine than others (personnaly I dream of a mix between civ3 diplomacy and hard-conquering and ctp2 future techs and units

I know, it's childish)

Libertarian:

True, I deserve it. (God, how did you know that I had reloaded just once to avoid the barbarian uprising??!!!)

Deornwulf · January 23, 2002, 09:31

I have seen ocean going galleys in more than one post-patch game I have played. I had the Lighthouse, so that couldn't be their excuse. I had Navigation, they did not. However, since I will not be installing Civ3 on my new machine, I will not be able to get the screenshots to prove it. (Besides, I have no clue how to get screenshots or screen captures.) Perhaps someone else can provide the evidence necessary to prove the existance of the ocean going galley.

Martin Gühmann · January 23, 2002, 10:16

Quote:

Originally posted by achtungpanzer
CTP2 is a nice looking game but its unbalanced by the "army" principle (12 tanks = super weapon) and poor diplomacy. Civ3 is much better (except for not being able to move units in stacks NOT fight as a stack) as the game is more baalnced. I like the corruption/culture flipping as within the bounds of a PC its the best way to model the real life difficulty of invading another nation and absorbing it into your own. Civ2 was very boring in that context.

You are talking about Civ3.5 not Civ4. So you never tried DiploMod, you never played Cradle. Civ"3" used the obsolete Civ2 engine. For instance the 8bit 255 colors graphics. The obsolete city managment system every turn a popup message, for every building that is finished. Do this with 200 cities. Improving land is also such a weak point. You need to have 200 units just to improve all the tiles of your Civ well in an appropiate number of turns.

Now lets go to the AI: You never played a game with mods, and I am only talking here about the modded version of CTP2: Mods achieved a lot of improvements in the game for instance Cradle in this mod the AI now focus on attacking enemy cities and not on defending its own cities. AI can be set so it can exploid the global sliders. If you do this you will get some time a question in the CTP2 forum if the AI is cheating.

Unmodded it looked the way around, I was the most advanced Civ from the start and now there are a lot of other civs which will fill the space on the map very quickly which their cities.

There are a lot of work arounds in CTP2 and it can also give you nice ideas for new features. To give goods food/production/commerce boni was such an idea. Now Goods can be pillaged like tile improvements in GoodMod. We just discovered how to make the AI terraforming its terrain. A new feature that I heard that this should be part of Civ3, was very quickly addapted to CTP2.

So you can do a lot in CTP2 without the help of Activision, Firaxis...

Quote:

Originally posted by achtungpanzer
The lack of ZOC's feels better as well as they have caused me more fights outside of cities - real armies tend to fight in the field!

Yeah real armies tend to fight in the field so with ZOCs you have at first fight against the units in field, than you can conquer the city. And it is so easy to avoid possible problems by just removing one feature. However it increases AI performance.

-Martin

Willem · January 23, 2002, 12:36

Quote:

Originally posted by Encomium

Fourteen turns later, the English come to me, and GET THIS. . .try to SELL ME A TECH!!! They are now one tech AHEAD of me!!

The English are an expansionist civ just like the Iroquois, so they have the same possibility of getting techs from goody huts as you did.

Willem · January 23, 2002, 12:45

Quote:

Originally posted by dix2der
We've noticed with a friend of mine that the others civs always attack the weaker spots of your empires - for example the last city where you haven't upgraded your two spearmen to pikemen. I know it's possible to do investigation, but not on all the cities.

What's the difference between investigating one city or all of them? Once an embassy is established, it's a simple matter of knowing exactly which are the weakest cities. You can do the same thing yourself, if you want to part with some of your gold. Maybe that's why the other civs always seem to be low on funds, they're spending it on investigating cities.

dix2der · January 23, 2002, 12:46

A galley can go through ocean. The problem is to finish the turn on a coastal square. I never saw such a cheat, but I don't know (it is definitely possible

)

In civ3, no need to manage 200 cities. Due to super corruption system, you just can't

Willem · January 23, 2002, 12:48

Quote:

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann

The obsolete city managment system every turn a popup message, for every building that is finished. Do this with 200 cities.

You can go to the preferences and turn this off.

dix2der · January 23, 2002, 12:51

Willem: hum, interesting point. Difficult to be sure: the way the AI manage its empire is so different than a player's one (no corruption, tech advances in hardest modes) that I can't determine if it's logical - I mean, the parallelism low funds/high knowledge of enemy territory.

Bah, it MUST be that

(I WANT TO BELIEVE)

Soren Johnson · January 23, 2002, 14:03

Quote:

Originally posted by Encomium
Five civs. I am the Iroquois. Regent level.

I had changed in the Editor scout movement values to '4', and I managed to luckily get FOUR tech advances from the goody-huts.

I check some other civs early in the game and I am FOUR techs ahead of them, and with a lot more money, too.

FOUR TECHS.

Fourteen turns later, the English come to me, and GET THIS. . .try to SELL ME A TECH!!! They are now one tech AHEAD of me!!

If all four civs worked together and spent every gold in their combined treasuries they couldn't have passed me. Never.

The AI GAVE THEM tech advances after seeing I was "too far" ahead.

This is the same AI that allows various other cheats, such as ocean-going galleys - why exploration is usually done by the time we get caravels.

Firaxis, IT STINKS.

It sounds to me like the AI traded techs during those fourteen turns to catch up with you. They are willing to trade them for anything of equal value: gold, maps, other techs, etc. Most likely, it was for other techs as when the game begins each civ gets two techs, at least one of which does not overlap with any other civ. Please note that as more civs acquire each tech, its value goes down, which makes the AI more willing to trade it, sort of a feedback effect (and this applies equally to the player as well as the AI... i.e. the same function is used to determine the value of a tech for both AI-to-AI trades and human-to-AI trades).

Galleys can sail safely in sea squares once Astronomy is discovered, and galleys can sail safely in ocean squares once either Navigation or Magnetism is discovered. This applies to the human as well as the AI.

Willem · January 23, 2002, 14:19

Quote:

Originally posted by Soren Johnson Firaxis

It sounds to me like the AI traded techs during those fourteen turns to catch up with you. They are willing to trade them for anything of equal value: gold, maps, other techs, etc. Most likely, it was for other techs as when the game begins each civ gets two techs, at least one of which does not overlap with any other civ. Please note that as more civs acquire each tech, its value goes down, which makes the AI more willing to trade it, sort of a feedback effect (and this applies equally to the player as well as the AI... i.e. the same function is used to determine the value of a tech for both AI-to-AI trades and human-to-AI trades).

Galleys can sail safely in sea squares once Astronomy is discovered, and galleys can sail safely in ocean squares once either Navigation or Magnetism is discovered. This applies to the human as well as the AI.

A little off topic but I have a question for you Soren. Are some of the civs programmed to be harder to bargain with than others? It may be my imagination, but it seems to me that my dealings with Cleopatra tend to be somewhat harder than with other civs. Everytime I deal with her, she usually ends up driving a hard bargain.

Soren Johnson · January 23, 2002, 14:24

Quote:

Originally posted by Willem

A little off topic but I have a question for you Soren. Are some of the civs programmed to be harder to bargain with than others? It may be my imagination, but it seems to me that my dealings with Cleopatra tend to be somewhat harder than with other civs. Everytime I deal with her, she usually ends up driving a hard bargain.

Yes, they are (and thank you for noticing...) Some civs like to trade a lot, and others are much more guarded.

Willem · January 23, 2002, 14:36

Quote:

Originally posted by Soren Johnson Firaxis

Yes, they are (and thank you for noticing...) Some civs like to trade a lot, and others are much more guarded.

You're welcome, and thanks for taking the time to answer my question.

Libertarian · January 23, 2002, 14:57

A very meaty response. I have criticized much about Firaxis and its Keystone-cop PR, but have always defended Soren and the AI. You can see why.

Arrian · January 23, 2002, 15:03

AH! Very interesting. That confirms a suspicion I had. It would be interesting to know for sure which civs are the "traders" and which aren't, but I can make some educated guesses.

On the subject of galleys in the ocean... well, I'm playing on Marla's world map right now, and I have updated AI world maps pretty much all the time (my territory map appears to be worth their world map plus some gold), and I didn't see any ocean exploration until navigation. I admit, however, that I sometimes get irritated at the AI's uncanny ability to find those offshore islands and colonize them before I can. Marla's map is the exception, because the human player knows the geography at the start.

-Arrian