[couslee]

tbontob. I would not necessarily say your AI would be cheating, just very hard to beat. If the best you can hope for is a tie, IE you make exactly all the same decisions the AI does. I don't know that I would call that a cheat, but a balance issue. Of couse, you can program an AI to win all the time by following a specific "perfect strategy". However, If it were me, I would have considered programming the AI to make a few mistakes, tho not many. An "easy" game setting would have more AI price flucations add than on "hardest". hardest would still have some in there, so as to make the game a challange and not too unbalanced towards the AI. But enough that if the player didn't develope a steady price strategy, the AI would get a victory. That, also is not cheating imo. Reason being, is the AI is still playing the game within the game parameters. Having the AI peek at the player inventories would be a cheat.

Take SMAC for example, and a blantent cheat I caught it doing. In SMAC, if you switch production from one item to another, 50% of any minerals over 10 is lost. If you have accumulated more than the cost of the item you switched to, you only got the 10 carry over. You can still do the switch, but you pay the penalty. I had infiltrated this paticular faction, and saw it was close to completing a "wonder" it had a ton of minerals accumulated. I built a probe team, to attack the construction of the base, and destroy the production. the AI switched to a probe team for defence (probe vs probe=combat). probe teams are cheap. any minerals over the production cost are not carried over, with the exception of the first ten minerals. The AI built the probe team, and had a full carry over of the excess, so the "wonder" production was only delayed one turn and it didn't lose anything. what I called a cheat on that, was not that it could see my hidden probe team (which is a cheat, but minor and necessary imo) but that it didn't lose ANY of the excess minerals accumulated. I sent the save file to firaxis as a bug report, but it got ignored. The "no loss carryover" is way outside of the game rules of play. So i guess what I am trying to say on that, is if the AI is allowed to do things the player is not, that is a cheat. If it just makes a better decision, that is good programming. In your example, the AI (would have) only followed a steady price plan. If the AI was not impacted at all by doing excessive price changes, that would be outside of the game.

That is why my first assumption was an outrage. (glad i was worng). a unit getting extra movement that a player can not get with ANY race setting would have been a cheat.

And as i said before, selecting "harder settings" is not a cheat either, as long as the AI plays within the game parameters.

I am not a programmer, by any strech of the imagination. So if I used a "wrong term" somewhere but you got the point, then at least I explained myself enough. (sorry if I repeated myself too, I am tired and a little foggy headed)

[ January 30, 2003, 21:15: Message edited by: couslee ]