The Cheaters v1.3 released
 

Before my computer went belly-up I started working on a race style called the Cheaters.

Basically they were to use every dastardly AI trick to take advantages of all the things the AI can do and the human player can't. So far they had ships with 12 engines on them, Construction bases with 2 Space Yards, and Defense bases that used Afterburners and could move in tactical combat. I started experimenting with troop weapons on ships before I lost anything.

I'm going to continue working on the Cheaters when my computer's running again, but in the mean time if anyone else has any ideas on unfair AI tricks, post them here. I'm sure I don't know everything.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

On adamant, the AI has a tendency to use colony types that they haven't researched yet.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

Using star destroyers when they have only attained a low level of stellar manip..... if that is possible.

Using small ships with shields, regen, organic armor, ECM and warheads. Well that's not entirely cheating but it is a nsaty little trick, especially if your shield gen/regens are hi-lev and the enemy weapons are not that strong. Their shields will soak up a LOT of damage, and their organic armor can also assure them safety for a while, while the ECM makes sure the enemy misses more often, so they can get close enough for the ramming. Since they're small, you can produce them in fairly large numbers, while warheads are still strong against large enemy warships.....

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

They were never able to use the colony ships to colonize planets. They would just design and build empty ships. This has been fixed though, many months ago...

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

I was not aware that the AI designs could violate player restrictions and still get built. This idea sounds neat. I think I might enjoy playing against the "Cheaters".

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

I've seen ships with multiple auxillary control centers before.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

Oh yeah, The AI follows completely different rules for ship design than the human player. I'm not sure about some of the other things, but it sure would be fun to find out.

I think it might be possible to put cargo bays on weapon platforms giving planets cheap extra cargo space. The extra engines and double spaceyards are absolutely confirmed. That was the first thing I tested.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

The AI ignores every single restriction in ship designing you can imagine. You can even get it to upgrade ship-only components to troop-only components if you are not careful in setting up a mod (overlapping family numbers are the bane of modders everywhere).

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

Interesting. So the AI could have a dreadnaught filled with ground cannons...

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

If the ground cannons are more advanced than some sort of weapon you add to the ship design that the AI can place on the ships in the first place, yes.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

I wonder if a "cheater" race already exists, unknowingly.

I also wonder if a "cheater" race would be allowed in any future "AI Deathmatch" tourneys.

I would think that if the AI doesn't need to obey any of the construction rules, then they could use multiple spaceyards on a ship/base, maybe even a planet, to really have a significant construction advantage.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

They could possibly go over the facility limit. A planet with 200 resource facilities...

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

No, the facility spaces and ship size are enforced for AI's. Multiple space yards on a planet might be possible, though, and multiple space yards on a ship has already been posted as in use for this race.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

I think that the Cheaters may very well be allowed in the AI Deathmatches, for players who want to play against a REALLY tough player..... also, are you making the rest of the AI for this race TDMishly hard? Then it would be a real boasting feat if you beat one of these in the AI Deathmatch.....

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

I think Cheaters should all have a reset button to stop the game and force you to start over from scratch if they begin to lose.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

I believe the max number of spaceyards the AI can put on a ship or base hull is 2. The spaceyards are each 400kt and the largest hull size can only fit two.

The Cheaters AI will use the stock data files, so you could just plug them into your regular game. My computer is still broken and I'm waiting for the Windows XP cd from home so I can fix it. Once I do, I can get back to work on race.

As for being allowed in an AI Deathmatch, I personally think it would be unfair because it's not a regular AI. But if whoever's running the match will allow it, I will enter them. Tournaments are always fun. The Cheaters will be like the Harlem Globetrotters of AI modding.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

Huh? A starbase is 2500 kT. That is easily 5 space yards, or 6 with a master computer. A baseship is 1500 kT. That is easily 3, still leaving enough space for essentials...

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

Oh yeah. I was thinking about ship hulls. But I tried adding more than two spaceyards using several req ability entries, but the max number of spaceyards remained two. I think the AI was placing one for the req abilities and one for the majority component ability.

Now that I think about it, I never tried it with the secondary component ability. That might yield 3 spaceyards.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

I was working on the Cheaters this afternoon and their ship designs were very fast. I was testing them in combat when I realized: How fast your ships are doesn't matter in combat.

Aside from being able to catch a ship that's running away from you, the speed of your ship has little or no effect on its combat effectiveness. What makes a ship effective is having just enough speed to reach the enemy first by jumping in at them from just outside of weapons range, and bringing enough firepower to destroy them before they have a chance to fire back.

Obviously an AI won't be able to do that as perfectly as a human, but if I consider most enemy ships will start out on the opposite side of the map, and have a combat speed of 3 or 4, I should be able to figure out an optimal number of engines to give an attack ship enough movement to win most of the time against a comparable opponent.

Of course, I also need a high damage first strike weapon. I'm thinking about using Rocket Pods, but I don't like the short range and the refire rate. The Cheaters build Kamikaze ships with Mine Warheads on them, giving them tremendous damage potential, but you also loose the ship.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

The Cheaters v1.0

The cheats they use:
200x Space Yard rate
Puts more than 6 engines on ship designs
Uses non-ship components on ships

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

I checked this out and the cheats could make for an interesting challenge. However, there is a problem, a great construction rate doesn't do any good if the race isn't reproducing its population. So... I took the liberty of optomizing the AI_General file. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif I tried to stay with the spirit of your original set-up and came up with the attached file. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

You forgot to mention "ignores limits on range of characteristics". Speaking of which, if you set up the politics file to never have trade treaties, you could drop political savvy far into the negatives for extra points. Also, if you really want a challenge from them, change the culture to berzerkers and raise aggressiveness/defensiveness to illegally high levels (greater than 125). That would be much more effective than going all out construction and maintenance, provided that the ship design includes enough PDC's to neutralize missiles.

Edit: If you don't care about making troops completely useless for actual combat, which you apparently don't since physical strength is at 0, you could also drop physical strength to a very negative value to get extra points.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

Yeah. I found that out. I was wondering why the AI would build and expand and then all of a sudden have zero minerals. I did some tweaking of the AI_general file as well. I'm looking at your AI_general file and it looks like we did a lot of the same things, except I kept Maintenance Reduction, and raised Repair Aptitude.

Cheaters v1.2
 

Cheaters v1.2 Download here.

Balanced the racial traits a little better.
Tweaked the Ship Designs and the Research file a little.
Added ship names file Cheaters.txt
They wiped out the stock Fazrah in the first 24 turns.

Re: Cheaters v1.2
 

I'm quite suprised that the game allows you to bypass the limits in the AI_General file like this. I remember doing some testing on this way back and thought that it did not permit this, but I may have only been testing Advanced racial traits. Do you have some parameters on this? For example, why did you choose 171% for shipyard instead of 999%? Are there actual limits in there somewhere that you can't pass?

Re: Cheaters v1.2
 

The only limits are the cost in racial points available at the start of the game, and as defined in the Settings.txt

For most traits it's
1-80 : 10 Points Each
81-120 : 25 Points Each
121-? : 50 Points Each

I don't know how high it can go, but it will cost you a lot of points. For Maintenance Reduction it's doubled except for the low end which is halved.

I initially put the Construction Aptitude at 175. With the 1000 point Advanced Trait (which was cheaper) it added up to 200%, but I found I needed to balance things out. I had reduced Repair Aptitude to 0 since the AI uses suicide ships, but then the AI was retrofitting starbases that never got repaired. I also had Environmental Resistance reduced to 0 because I didn't know what it did. The population never grew.

I reduced the Construction Aptitude to 171 to get some points for other things.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

Empires created from AI_General files can ignore the minimum and maximum values for characteristics, but cannot spend more than the allowed number of points.

Anyway, since the whole point of this race is to exploit bugs that are available only to the AI, why stop at 0 with physical strength? Negative values generate points just fine, and don't have any worse effect than 0 does.

Re: Cheaters v1.2
 

Ok, it still stops you from using more than total number of points allowed, but you can reduce individual stats below or above their normal limits, interesting.

The current stats you have there in v1.2 aren't for a 200o point race. You have another 550 points you can use. That's enough for 120% in research, or to bring the ground combat back up if you want to make the Cheaters use troops.

Also, you've got the Opt 1, Opt 2 and Opt 3 settings all the same. So in a 3000 or 5000 point game you are leaving a lot of points on the table. You could raise a lot of your stats in the opt 2 and 3 charateristics, or throw in some advanced racial traits there.

Your choice to lower the mining rate might be a mistake. With such a high construction rate it seems like it would be quite easy for the AI to spend itself broke. Of course if you play with bonuses that won't be as much of a problem.

Geoschmo

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

Really, that's quite interesting. Typically SE4 doesn't like negative values for anything. It's oddly inconsistant for it to permit it in this one area.

Geoschmo

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

Douglas, are you sure about this? I tried running a test just now setting the physical strength to -10 and it breaks it and sets the physical strength in game to average(100%) instead of 0 or minus 10. This results in too many points being used down the line and the construction aptitude also being set to average.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

I can confirm what Geo says, you can not use a negative number for a characteristic. That was the first thing i tried! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

In the file I uploaded a 5000 point start would give the cheaters a defensiveness of 45, I felt that a high defensive value would be important to a race that likes to ram.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

Hmm, seems I was wrong. I was going by the fact that another way I found to ignore characteristic limits that I'm not too sure I want to post, as it is possible for human players and would allow blatant but not easily detectable cheating on PBW, allowed negative characteristics. For example, I set up one race with a negative political savvy and started a test game with it and another race in the same system. When I had them establish a trade treaty, this race received negative income from the treaty. I just assumed that if it allowed negative values one way, there wouldn't be an explicit check for negatives separate from the supposed limits from settings.txt for any way of circumventing those limits.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

I tried negative values for a few of the traits, but they didn't work. I assumed it didn't work for any of them. As for the v1.2 general file, I must have miscalculated the number of racial points required (since you can't set them manually)

v1.3 fixes some of the maintenance and construction problems. And I think they use all available points. Ships with all the tiny components on them cost a lot and were draining the empire's minerals supply. Except for the kamikazes, they're actually inferior to most other middle-to-late-game warships one-on-one. They are tough in fleets though.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

You mean the race that made the treaty with the modified empire got negative resources? You may have created the first resource vampire race.

Cheaters v1.3
 

Cheaters v1.3 released

fixed resource problems
fixed racial traits file
added anti-cheat disclaimer

A few ways to check for AI_General file cheats:
A suspicious number of "non-existant" traits.
Maintenance Aptitude of "God-like" (can't happen in a normal AI_General)

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

No, the modified empire itself was the one getting negative income from it. I also tried it with negative physical strength and repair aptitude, which are possible but not through AI_General files. The first made capturing planets literally impossible, and the second just made repairs never progress. If a player knew how to achieve these things and was willing to accept either of these handicaps, he would have effectively unlimited racial points and would be able to ignore maximum characteristic values as well. If I really wanted to, I could set up an empire with 2000% intelligence and use it in stock PBW games. As long as I made sure that the rest of my setup left enough points, assuming minimum values within the label's range for everything, to raise intelligence to "God-like" at 130%, and never established treaties higher than plain trade alliances, no one would be able to tell that I was cheating unless they bothered to calculate how much research it would take to get the techs they had observed me using and figured out that the result was literally impossibly high for that far into the game.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

I'm still not clear how you are doing this? How do you get negative values to work at all? I have not been able to. Every time I set a value to negative it breaks and that value gets set back to 100%

Edit: Sigh, never mind. I figured it out. Yes unfortunatly this could be used on PBW to cheat. It would be hard to detect under normal circumstances during the game by the other players. However, if anyone had suspicions the game owner or the PBW admins could fairly easily verify it. It would be impossible for the cheater to cover their tracks after the fact. Someone despicable enough to pull something like this runs the risk of seriously damaging their reputation.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

I've been avoiding posting how I did it for fear of some unscrupulous forumgoer using it to cheat on PBW. I'll send you a PM explaining it.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

That's allright. I figured it out and updated my post.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

I don't think we really have to worry too much about it but I agree with you about not posting the how to.

However, I can think of a good use for this trick, it would make setting up god-like races for theme games much easier. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif