At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

At what difficulty level and to what degree does the AI cheat?

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

It doesn't really "cheat" in terms of what most AIs do. It only has one advantage over players, which is that it always knows the ownership status of any province. That is to balance the fact human players can very easily intuit the same information from the dominion candles and so forth.

The difficulty levels control how many points the AI has to spend on its nation. On the Easy level, the AI has less points than the player. On Normal, everybody has the same, and the higher difficulty levels mean more design points for the AI nations.

Other than that, the AI has to play by the same rules as the player.

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

In other words, the level of AI difficulty only affects the amount of points the AI can spend on its pretender at the beginning of the game and has no affect on how intelligently it plays?

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

Correct.

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

In yet other words, at higher levels the Ai will have better Pretenders and/or Scales, but otherwise will *NOT* get a Gold/Production Bonus?

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

Correct, again. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

EDIT: this is actually fairly easy to check out for yourself by confining an AI to a single province (or maybe just a couple) and then seeing what the AI builds and how much of it. The AI has to cope with the exact same gold and resource limits you do.

What this means, given how well the Dom AI plays without cheating like those of other games, is that it's a truly superior AI.

Newbies to the game can also carefully observe what the AI builds and use it as clues to those nation's strengths and weaknesses. It can be quite educational.

[ February 22, 2004, 03:49: Message edited by: Arryn ]

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

The AI also seems to have a disturbingly omniscient ability to know where your commanders happen to be at any time: At the STRANGEST times, you'll find lone commanders out in the back of heavily patrolled territories being ARROWED!

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

Norfy, it may just seem that way (the AI "cheating" by nailing commanders deep in the rear) but what I suspect is really going on is that the AI is trying to arrow much more frequently than that and you don't get any clue because there's no warning of failed attempts when the AI misses. You don't see a message saying "An arrow fell out of the sky and landed harmlessly in a pile of horse manure." http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

The only real cheating is that the AIs know which provinces are under your control, even if they are in your "rear areas".

[ February 23, 2004, 05:14: Message edited by: Arryn ]

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

The AI could be using scouts/and or astral window as well 8)

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">The AI should earn more research points during mid and late game for higher difficulty levels. The AI seems to ignore the idea of placing units into research... causing human players to take the lead by mid and late game.

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

I'm noticing in my current game the AI is not using a lot of units to research so I'm easily out researching them. Also, does the AI ever build forts? It doesn't seem to. Does the AI ever forge magic items? Again, it doesn't seem to. I hope these problems can be fixed in a patch.

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

The AI does appear to forge items; I've seen commanders, especially pretenders, decked out in gear albeit perhaps not the most logical selections. It will also use empowerment, global enchantments, remote summons...
It does research, but might not emphasize it enough for a large slow-paced game.
As far as I recall, it does not yet build castles.

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Unless there is a random event or magic site that will give you Fortified City, he does http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif .
However he doesn't do it very often (maybe cost of castle could be the reason).

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

The AI does know your province defense the turn you set it. I think this might be linked to the fact that you cannot "unbuy" province defense purchased that round, as if it gets saved. It is clear the AI hasaccess to this info.

Does anyone know if the AI on diffcult level starts with a larger army? I sometimes run into the AI on turn 3 or 4, and they have some damn big armies, that do not appear to be merc-based.

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Unless there is a random event or magic site that will give you Fortified City, he does http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif .
However he doesn't do it very often (maybe cost of castle could be the reason). </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I think I've gotten Fortified Cities from events, actually -- isn't that the "city builds a ring fortress" one?

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Hmm, never got that event but it's possible.

Not sure what are reasons behind such AI-don't-like-building-castles behavior but I remember seeing that discussion in another thread earlier (somewhere at the time when game was released). I guess main problem is how to make AI realize what is best time and place to invest in building castles.

Re: At what difficulty does the AI cheat?
 

You definitely can get Fortified Cities from an event, and it _is_ the building a ring idea.

Just FYI