At what difficulty does the AI cheat?

ioticus · #1 February 22nd, 2004, 12:46 AM

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

Psitticine · #2 February 22nd, 2004, 02:32 AM

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.

ioticus · #3 February 22nd, 2004, 02:55 AM

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?

Arryn · #4 February 22nd, 2004, 03:01 AM

Correct.

Coffeedragon · #5 February 22nd, 2004, 05:30 AM

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?

Arryn · #6 February 22nd, 2004, 05:41 AM

Correct, again.

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 ]

Norfleet · #7 February 23rd, 2004, 06:30 AM

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!

Arryn · #8 February 23rd, 2004, 06:43 AM

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."

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 ]

velk · #9 February 23rd, 2004, 07:55 AM

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

NTJedi · #10 February 23rd, 2004, 05:19 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Psitticine:

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.

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.