quote:
Originally posted by Courageous:
I personally believe you have chosen the best two ways for an AI to "cheat". In the game Imperialism II, I believe that they make use of both of these strategies and disguise them quite well. It's worthy of note that Imperialism II has to be one of the most difficult strategy games of all time. That game will bust your ***.
Personally I don't find AI's which cheat over information to be offensive at all. That's just my opinion, though.
Different people have different opinions about this, ranging from "the AI should not cheat at all", through, "it can cheat if you can't tell", to "do whatever you have to to give a challenge".
When we did the AI for Imperialism II we took roughly the middle choice above. It wasn't because we were lazy, it was because we didn't want to make a game that was easy for an experienced strategy game player to beat after a couple of tries. (Although I'm afraid we went a bit overboard on the difficulty.)
Our determination of what was an acceptable "cheat" was based on our belief that it was important that it feel like the AI is playing the same game as the human. We ended up with few information related cheats, but not global knowledge about what the human is doing. For example, the AI knows what units the human has in each place, but does not know what moves the human has entered for those units for the following turn.
I prefer this kind of limited cheating because I've never seen a game without it that can give me much of a challenge, but many others disagree with me.
Ben Polk