Simultaneous Games

[tbontob]

Originally posted by couslee:

quote:

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Originally posted by tbontob:
(1)One of the threads discussed how the AI was able to adjust by reasearching and then modifying its ships to attack human empires without first observing the changes in the human ships first.

(2)And yes, it is probably the total score. But that is still a cheat in games where we humans cannot see the others score.

1. not sure about that. bet it was a good thread.
2. setting are NOT CHEATS you can make the "view all player scores" in the game set up.
some "harder" settings give the AI bounses.
some "harder" settings give the player handicaps.
Not selecting "view all players scores" is one of the second variety.

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1) I search the old threads on a regular basis. Must do 4 or 5 searches a day and read at the very least 100 old Posts, some going back as far as 2001 and earlier.

I came across this particular thread in one of my searches and think it was about a year old although it could be earlier by as much as a year or two. I can't remember as I do so many searches. It was not something I was looking for but found it interesting and didn't take any notes.

Anyways a bunch of "well known guys" were discussing it and had devised some tests which to their minds "proved" the AI cheated.

About two months ago, I asserted the AI did not cheat. Nobody took me up on it. But then I started wondering how AI's could as a group suddenly declare war on me...some of which I had the most minimal of contact. We couldn't view each others scores and yet they knew somehow that my empire was the most strongest of all.

In 1981, I bought my first computer, an Apple II+. At that time, games were few and far between.

So, I thought I would program my own game for the time when a bunch of us guys got together on Saturday for beer and pretzels.

It was called "Prices" and could be said to be an earlier Version of "Capitalism".

Essentially, each player had a company which produced "widgets", with a current retail price of $10.00. Each turn, the CEO had to decide on the price of his widget, research budget, production, the number of plants to build (if any) and a few other variables.

I didn't play as I knew the algorithym to success.

Essentially, the two most important factors were price and research. These had long term effects not immediately obvious.

The other factors also affected the profitability but generally only for that month. So overproducing meant higher inventory costs and a lower profit for the month. Underproducing meant lost sales, and a lower profit.

Price had a major impact on sales. What they didn't know was that a stable price was important to the consumers confidence in their product. So, changing the price up and down from month to month to get rid of excess inventory or to generate sales was not the means to success. IIRC a .1 % increase per month gave the best results. No increase or .2% would still give very good results. Reducing the price was not a good thing as its adverse effects would be felt over many turns.

Reseach had a major effect on sales as well, but its effects were not as obvious as a price change and were spread out over many periods. It also had a multiplier effect. Consistancy in research within a certain range from period to period also provided the best results.

Each month, my friends would be supplied with a monthly profit and loss statement, a monthly balance sheet and a 'decision sheet' on which they would have to submit their decisions for the next turn. They would have no access to their opponents P & L statement and Balance Sheet.

Each year end, they would be supplied with a government statement on such things as total sales, investment,etc in the economy.

It was a lot of fun. And the ones who felt they were losing would often "try" use their decisions to make the program give wierd results to the players. I had anticipated it, but even so the economy would sometimes show signs of a depression or inflation as a result of these particular decisions.

The important thing is that I had not programed an AI to play the game.

If I did, how would I have programed it? If I programed it to price its product with a 1% percent price increase each turn, is that not cheating?

And if it isn't, who would want to play against an opponent who consistently wins?

If I let it just flounder around, it would not be a very good opponent.

Or I could let it cheat and have it take a peak at it's opponents inputs or their profit and loss statements, massage the data and use it to affect the AI's input.

On a basic level, my feeling is the computer must "cheat" in some way because it is not able to learn from its mistakes and successes.

[Phoenix-D]

"At no point during this game have I used shift click to move any ships at all. they were in a fleet, and they moved one at a time, one right after the other. that is why it looked like it was firing on the enemy ship"

That's a display problem. I've seen it before, but the fleet has always engaged at the same time..

phoenix-D

[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 ]

[PvK]

Originally posted by tbontob:
One of the threads discussed how the AI was able to adjust by reasearching and then modifying its ships to attack human empires without first observing the changes in the human ships first.

I'm quite sure this would be lucky guesswork on the part of whoever scripted the AI's they were facing. I've done SE4 AI reasearch files, and studied what the AI does with them, and I'm quite sure that it does not cheat in this way.

And yes, it is probably the total score. But that is still a cheat in games where we humans cannot see the others score.

It's clearly shown to be the total score in the AI files. I would also agree with couslee that it's not really a cheat - the players chose not to be able to see other scores. The fact that they can't prevent the AI doing this, for purposes of MEE, is not so much a cheat as a feature limitation.

Also, it seems to me that there are so many important things that the AI can't do which humans can, that most things the AI can do that humans can't, are small compensation - the AI is clearly at a massive disadvantage, because the game is complex in ways that humans can understand well, and AI's can't. Some compensation can be made with reasonable techniques like trying to estimate power with the score. I don't think it would make sense to want MM to program a huge separate analysis function to try to duplicate the way humans guess at enemy strength. It would be cool, but not as cool as the other features we got from MM in the time he would have had to take to develop such a system.

PvK

[couslee]

Lol, almost forgot why I pulled this thread up. considering the lenght of the other post, I thought i\t better to make a second one. Different topic.

I have a non-neutral AI that has been sending missle ships to attack one of my planets. Due to the unique match of "his" weapons against my WP, the only thing that happens every turn is a stalemate and continued blockade. I have been dispatching his units with a cheap ramming ship, but alas both get lost when one of my desings is built. No problems there. But because of his steady flow of missle ships, he has negletced to expand. he has tech I want, and is an "other" breather. So I want to force a surrender with minimal population loss on his side. But i can't seem to get a blockade going. my ships keep glassing the planet. I even tried to make a specific strategy to give the ship, but it still is not working. Is there an easy way to establish blockades in Simu games? I even reduced the planet damage setting to the min 10% (won't go to 0). That didn't work either. i do want some/one/whatever ships with weapons in case it either builds a WP, or sends one of his ships to clear the blockade. I probably could send a PDC only ship there, but that would not do any good against some of his designs, nor would that destroy any WP. I do not have troops yet. But even if i did and captured all his planets save one, I still need to establish a blockade to force the surrender. Any ideas?

oh yea, I was going to check the encyclopedia malfordica before posting, but forgot. will go there now, but posting this anyway cause i don't want to re-type the details out again.

Edit in: LOL, blockading is not even a listed topic. and the faq does not address this in PBW.

[ January 30, 2003, 21:39: Message edited by: couslee ]

[geoschmo]

If the priority is to not harm his planet the best way to blockade is to set your ships strategy to "No get hurt". It will run for the corner and stay there. Will not approach the planet and will not fire on it. You might lose a few to enemy ships or fighters as they don't defend themselves very well. They will stay in the corner and only shoot at ships that get in range. Also occasionally they will begin within range of the planets weapons and might get shot at the begining of combat. But they wont approach or fire at the planet.

Geoschmo

[couslee]

I thought about that G, but if i did do that, then ALL of the ships with that desing would follow "don't get hurt" which kinda defeats the purpose of weapons. will give it a shot with a custom strategy, and put the single blockader in it's own fleet and give it that strategy. maybe that will work. that way, my other fleet and single ships can go on as usual.

I sure use up a lot of fleet names in this game.
repair fleet
temp1
temp2
ect..ad nauseum
too bad the game gives you it's defualt choice only once.

[couslee]

LMELSAO (ever lovin skinny)
end turn
AI attacks my fleet and get slaughtered.
AI sends message in the same turn:
"Please consider entering into a trade alliance with us."

after 27 turns of a steady steam of ships attacking me, and not making any progress. and NOW he wants a treaty? Now that my "cheap shot" missle fleet is in his home sector? I bet he does!
Stupid Terrans. bar har har har.

Gonna work on that blockade strategy. lol

[couslee]

The only question remaining, is how come the fleet just sat for a couple of days before moving.

.

In the game in question, both ships had the same speed, so would have moved on the same day, which they did after my fleet had it's siesta.

I just got up from mine, and had this thought.
In turn based if you select a ship or fleet and click on the "warp" button, but remembered you forgot to check something, you can cancel the "select location" by clicking on a non-worm hole sector. If you click on "move to" and have the same realization, you can cancel that by clicking on the ship again. This does NOT work in Simultaneous games. It is possible, that this is the scenario that caused my ship to sit still for one of it's movement days. IF I clicked on the fleet, clicked on "attack" and then changed my mind and clicked on my own fleet to erase the "select target" message. If later I decided to go ahead an attack that unit, I would have clicked on the fleet again, and "attack" that ship. IIRC that was the case, because the fleet had a colony ship in it, and I decided to pull the colony ship out of the fleet so that it would go to the planet not via the enemy ship. Now, there is a game problem regarding that, and that is the inability to cancel a half selected order. Esc does not work, neither does delete or any other key I tried. And therin lies the problem. The "select" does not even cancel itself if you switch to another ship. This can cause a lot of mis-directed ships. Would be a nice feature to add if there is another patch.

[ January 31, 2003, 05:03: Message edited by: couslee ]

[capnq]

You can cancel any previously given order with the Clear Orders command (red circle & slash icon, hotkey Delete).