Re: Does the AI cheat?
As AIs go this one is very impressive. In the AI newsgroups it holds its own very well against many other games. There is alot of "thinking code" in there which would be very hard to improve on without breaking it out into seperate versions for each nation, and each tendency (defensive, aggressive, neutral) and even subcategories within.
As for cheating..
The settings only decides whether the AI will start with less, the same, or more points for creating their pretender and scales. Thats what happens when you decide how hard an AI you will go against.
Its very hard to create an AI that doesnt "cheat". Unless it plays like you (from another program that makes its turns) its going to know things. Being a part of the game itself means that it starts out seeing whole map, it knows what everyone is doing, it knows where hidden items are. Its not that the programmer gives access to that info to the AI. The programmer has to try and write the AI to limit its visions of such things. I think Illwinter has done a great job of avoiding that type of cheating.
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