Dominions III Artificial Intelligence

[Endoperez]

IIRC, it has been said earlier that giving out the turn files' syntax would make it very easy to cheat and make cheating scripts, but it stil would give only limited modding capabilities for those few people who would even want to try such a thing.

[Arralen]

Hmmm... I don't buy that argument.
( Btw., we're not talking about modding the game, but some way to automatically generate orders for all those tedious MM-task, and maybe a player-made external AI which whould use the same alghorithms. That's something different)

1) If there's a 100% check of orders on the server side, you would need to exploit bugs to cheat. And as every DOM can be run as client as well as as server, all the code to do the checks is available in the .exe => no need for and problems with dublicated code in client and server.

2) If I knew the file formats, I would be able to write an application (external AI), that can do everything a player can. Even more so: DOM in either server or client mode doesn't have any kind of memory. That's one of the causes why the AI has some troubles.
An external app could write all the info a player gets every turn to a file, so you e.g. always know which sites are in provinces you once owned, or which armies you have seen 2 or 4 turns before.
Furthermore, you could use that app to write orders to the turn file, e.g. have a commander move,patrol,move,patrol in your provinces automatically.
With everything in place, one could build an AI on top of those functions, which is -potentially- much more capable than the current one. And it wouldn't do anything else than read in a normally generated turn file, process it and write an order file, as the player does using DOM itself.

3)Security by obscurity is temporary at best
It's only a matter of time, before some figures out how things work. Sometimes you're lucky, but mostly those interested in such actvities are indeed more interested in self-profiling (even by cheating) than sharing their knowledge with the community. Search the forum for "Norfleet" ...

If, however, 1) does not apply, because the checks are made in client mode, I would suggest they throw away their code and start re-coding the game... .

[Endoperez]

I remember Norfleet, but I only know what he did, not how.

I haven't thought about the matter myself, though. I only remembered reading a similar comment from a dev once. You might well be right in both that the client shouldn't do anything without the server verifying it, AND that then releasing information about the turn files wouldn't give any more possibilities to cheat.

[Folket]

I did a search on Norfleet and I found that he was not the only one that found out how to cheat. Seems like the way to go is just to edit the 2h file with a hexeditor and by trial and error find out what can be done and what can not be done.

It would be possible to play a game where all players are human and then have a external program editing the 2h files for those that you do not plan to play. It would probably be a real painful exprience to do so. I remember whan I sat and decoded the map files in settlers 2 because a map was corrupt.