We need a CHEATING AI.

miato

Join Date 01/2008

We need a CHEATING AI.

Me and my 2 friends just stocked up on beer and munchies getting ready for a long weekend of Sins. I have played since January in the beta. Of my friends, one never played the game and the other played a few game the day before to get familiar with the game.

First game: 3v3 locked team Hard AI. Too easy, we beat them fairly fast and it was no trouble.

Second game, we figured 'what the heck'. 3v7 locked hard team in a Huge map. We won in 8 hours. My two friends were on a star system and i was on another. They had some trouble holding on and it was basically a stalemate on their side until i cleaned up my star system and came to their help. By then the game pretty much was won and went into mopping up status (btw we should be declared winner if we own 3/4 of the map to avoid those boring end game).

So we won at the HARDEST setting we could make with 1 veteran and 2 noobs? What is the point of playing now? My friends are just going to get better at the game if we play more. But since it's not even a challenge now, it will just be a cakewalk in later games. There is NO FUN in playing if you cannot lose!

We really really want to enjoy the game but cannot play with the current AI. Why can't we have a cheating AI? There is NOTHING WRONG with an AI that cheat. As long as we know what are the bonuses it's getting. Just like in Civ 4 the ONLY game we still play because it's still can be a challenge(team play vs AI on Emperor level)

I propose a Higher difficulty level for the AI with a sliding scale from 10-50% bonus in ship cost/fleet capacity/number of capital ship/fleet maintenance. That should make it a little bit more challenging and allow us to play the game. As it is, it's just no fun.

I dont' see why we cannot have a cheating AI for us gaming grognards. I understand, that you take pride on a good non-cheating AI. But the bottom line should be to make a fun game for us players. And it's not fun if we cannot lose.

So my main complain it the AI. But since we are at it. I would love to see an option to be declared winner if we own 3/4 of the map, as well as a way to speed up the game and/or more 4x stuff to do. As it is, we had too much time while playing. I mean we had time to alt tab to winamp and pick songs to listen, do beer run, sit around in the tech tree learning the game, browsing the web, and one even took a 30 mins nap without needing to pause the game!

Great game though. I just want to be able to enjoy it aka be challenged by it.

multiplayer

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There seems to be varying accounts on the a.i., with some claiming it as being extremely difficult, and others calling it a pushover.....Meh. I rarely believe those who say they plow through 20 hard a.i.'s with the greatest of ease......but that's just me.

Anyway, I'm not entirely certain how "cheating" a.i. will make the experience better.
It will still conduct the same tactics, only it'll be creating ships faster. Further, it's not like you're out thinking a wily opponent, just struggling to out produce them.

But to each his own I reckon, I'm merely rambling.

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Multiplayer against human opponent is one aspect of the game. But playing Coop with my friends against insane AI is what i prefer. We play on our own time. Can pause for food or beer run or watch a game on TV. It's relaxing, fun and free of stress.It's a different aspect of the game. In MMO there are people who like PvP and some like PvE or you can like both. So telling me to play pvp instead of PvE is of no help. It's a DIFFERENT type of game. Each his own.Especially on HUGE map how are you gonna find a reliable game? How are you going to make sure your opponent is going to sit thru an 8+ hours game and not quit on you? And the more people there is in the game the higher the likelyhood someone is gonna have a RL situation where they have to quit early. So even if you wanted to. You will not be able to play an EPIC game online against real opponent. But that wasn't the point anyway. I wanted EPIC PvE game, and the AI is too weak without cheating to provide me with that experience.

that is why you must go to stardock chat find people there that have lot of play
time i am sure you can find players there who like the same playing style like you and
your friends do

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There seems to be varying accounts on the a.i., with some claiming it as being extremely difficult, and others calling it a pushover.....Meh. I rarely believe those who say they plow through 20 hard a.i.'s with the greatest of ease......but that's just me.Anyway, I'm not entirely certain how "cheating" a.i. will make the experience better. It will still conduct the same tactics, only it'll be creating ships faster. Further, it's not like you're out thinking a wily opponent, just struggling to out produce them.But to each his own I reckon, I'm merely rambling.

I also don't believe those who can plow through 20 hard AI when you can only play with 9 at a time.

There is no games strategy or otherwise that has an AI that can out smart an average human being. So AI is only challenging if given some kind of an advantage. So far the only real challenge I have with the AI is when playing with unlock teams on med-large maps since it's hard to keep the AI from ganging up on me.
One of the biggest problems I have with the AI is when it outnumbered it runs away (nothing wrong with that) but it has nowhere to run to. I have the option of chasing their fleet killing them as we go or stop and destroy their planets.

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I also don't believe those who can plow through 20 hard AI when you can only play with 9 at a time.

Hmmmmm...... I was being sarcastic, I hope you were too.

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No offense, but shouldn't you be playing multiplayer then?

No! This game is supposed to be playable and fun for the single-player minded player as well! This has been the plan all along while the game has been developed.
A good A.I has been promised and based on the A.I of GCII, this is even expected.

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The game needs both things.
-Better AI.
-More settings for AI. A "very hard" and "impossible" setting, with cheating AI. The best would be a % bonus to money/resources.

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Well then, looks like you guys will have to wait a bit.

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The best would be a % bonus to money/resources.

Well why not do a system with Forge Tools then?. Help the AI. It is possible to make a map thats totally impossible for the player already. Not saying that one should make that

. That was just a thought.

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The best would be a % bonus to money/resources.Well why not do a system with Forge Tools then?. Help the AI. It is possible to make a map thats totally impossible for the player already.

A more simple way would to give the AI a head start. So do nothing for the first 10-30 minutes.
Yet this still wouldn't help the fact the AI is poor at defending as well as some odd reason it's very slow in researching military tech.

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There is no games strategy or otherwise that has an AI that can out smart an average human being.

Chess

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There is no games strategy or otherwise that has an AI that can out smart an average human being.Chess

Ok there is an exception yet even many chess programs cheat in the sense as it's uses an opening library in the beginning(instead of using the AI) to keep from making bad mistakes as well as avoid many traps.

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WarlokLord

Join Date 09/2007

+19

Cheating A.I.?!?

No thanks. I`ve had my fill of such experiences. Try a different approach.

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I don't think you're preparing the map properly. 3vs1vs1vs1vs1vs1... is not going to challenge the 3-team group, even if you start spread out.

Lock the AI into a 4+ team group, and provide them a huge star loaded with planets to farm up resources on, maybe give them a few colonized and upgraded ones to start faster on. You and your friends get your own little star, and fewer resources.

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How about having a handicap?

you could set a bonus/deficet for humans/AI in things like build time and ship cost

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What you really want is Frogboy AI for multithreaded CPU's

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Let me enlighten those of you who want a cheating A.I on how an AI for an RTS works.

There are 30,000+ different parameters being checked all at once, by each computer opponent, those parameters have different answers to each of them and out of that the little AI brain(which uses maybe 1/80th of your CPU) it produces what all those little parameters say to.

GCII, and CIV4 both have unique A.I in a Turn-based system where Even on Emperor, some A.I's don't cheat and still beat your ass...why? Cause they don't have to compete for Processing time...among other things.

You guys talk about a cheating AI, or perhaps scaling the A.I or Human to give handicaps, all are great ideas...but believe me, if you are able to beat all those A.I with very little difficulty I challenge you to try new tactics and strategies, adjust your playing and see how it changes.

Also if IC has said that their A.I. learns based on the Emulation of popular Player Strategies online, then we should be asking for an Online "Save" Feature so that you can come back to the game, and a safeguard against that inevitable possibility of an unintentional Disconnect.

If you've ever seen the program Daisy, you would understand how hard it is to "teach" an A.I. how to do things. It takes a lot of time and energy to think like any human would, and if you want to have a really good A.I. you have to give the Devs the tools they need. Having the A.I. cheat to be difficult is the oldest trick in the book guys...I put more stock in the IC programmers than to see them stoop to a shortcut when they are promising an A.I. that is supposedly as good as GCII. Give them time.

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Make a huge map thats imbalanced to you: ie less planets & less resources for you two. One access in & out of your system.
Load it up up 7 AI (lock them to same team) vs you two. If that still seems simple make all AI players Advent & Tec.

Superb shield strength & repairs. have fun with that .

That'd be very interesting at least. Any takers?

A friend and I did this, although since it was only 2 of us we are currently playing 4 AI's instead (all on one team)

Made them randoms but it turned out 2 advent 1 tec 1 vasari.
The map was custom made in a shorter period of time, we each have 1 ice 1 volc 1 random-ice/volc. Choke points are a desert planet (each), both connected to eachother and leading to the only entrance to the galaxy, the star. But we are not getting attacked..

Testing seems to show that the AI just don't like a guarded planet as the first connection from the star/wormhole. In previous games we were playing against only 3 AI, yet had out star system raided constantly even early game.
In that game our bases were connected at a single choke point (which was uncolonizable) next to the wormhole , and after the choke point it split off into 2 pathways, so our defenses were never really within a star system of each other.

This is a shame because in this 2v4 game I scouted them, only to find they were just sitting on the first planet in their star system. My scout lasted literally a second, their combined fleet was MASSIVE. Without going into detail if they attacked at the same time even though our defenses were basicly back-to-back, we would've been smothered. (but what a damn fight........which is what we wanted!)

Hopefully some modders take up the challenge to make either a more challenging AI, or atleast put in higher difficulties/resource+buildtime scaler. Anything for the short term.
Although i love stardock as a company, in this industry AI seems to RARELY be a priority, most likely because it takes the most work and has the least visibility.

edit:playing against agressive AI (hard), which seems to be the most challenging.

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dunno why people are against adding this. It's not like the game is forcing you to play against the cheating AI. More options can't hurt, if people want the option of harder AI settings why should it be denied, especially if it can be fairly simply introduced (like just adding a new difficulty setting above hard where the hard AI has more money)

One of the things that kept me playing galactic Civ for so long was the fact that the harder AI settings were really challenging. If the game stopped at the "tough" settings (the hardest settings where the AI doesn't cheat) I don't think I would have played it for very long because I was beating that setting easily within a week of owning the game.

I'm all for improvements in the non-cheating AI, but why not give people the option of playing against a tougher AI if they want.

And yeah, not everyone likes multiplayer, and given that games can take days to complete it's often realistically not viable to play multiplayer epic games, especially if you don't know anyone else who plays.

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Sure it will be nice when the AI gets polished from it's newbieness (nevermind that .. word?). I'm not sure how much modders can do if IC dont want to us to mess with the real stuff - AI might be hard-coded. I suppose it's up to them, it usually is.

Ironman mode : 4 Bonuses to AI:
Increased speed on building & research, increased income gains, deals 5% more damage.

@chronicpayne:

A friend and I did this

Thats nice. Dont know what triggers the AI to think it has lost the fight. As it can pull out even if it's outnumbering the player(s). One thing, the AI is an opportunist most of the time. If the planet is undefended or the defending fleet leaves, they'll be there. I like baiting the AI to attack on purpose.

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A problem I've noticed with the AI is that they seem to give up after a while. I think that this is because of its inability to assess the situation.

For example, if you beat down a player's fleet, he's probably going to spend the next few minutes focusing on rebuilding his fleet and ramping up his defenses, especially if it was mostly just the fleet and not infrastructure. The computer on the other hand doesn't do that. The computer just sort of keeps on playing at the default rate of exploration, researching, colonization, and fleet-building, regardless of what's been going on.

It's not so much the difficulty that bothers me, since I can just stack on more and more computers if I want to get beat, but it's how artificial the artificial intelligence is that makes single player really feel lacking. Yes, improvements are in the works, but the assessment for the moment is that the AI is pretty bad. And yes, there's multiplayer, but single player is a part of the game too.

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Now I've had some time to play and think about it, I agree with miato. Once you've played the game every which way against the AI, it's time to play against a *blatantly* cheating AI.

Forget fairness. This is about long, long term game value. Make it clear to the player that the AI WILL cheat, and it's fair enough. If you are a glutton for punishment, that is the player's choice.

Heck, add maybe two or three extra hard AI difficulty levels. Why not? It's not hard to give the AI the speed/resource boost. It's much harder to actually come up with new AI algorithms that act intelligently.

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I think "cheating AI" is a little misleading as some here really are saying they want a "handicap" option. Even in golf, many plays the game with an handicap yet it isn't called cheating as they still playing by the same rules.

As of now I play the SP game with a small handicap of not leaving my home world (including scouts) until the first pirate raid. Thus given the AI a small head start. Soon I going to try not leaving my homeworld until the second pirate raid.

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Smidlee, let me clarify. I was thinking along the lines of a resource rate boost. Basically "extreme" would be 150% resource collection rate increase, while "insane" would be 200% (or more).

I believe that is how most RTS games do it. In any case, if Ironclad wanted to do something like that, they would be well aware of how to do it. It's just whether they *want* to do it.

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TheRealWarpstorm

Join Date 03/2003

+13

CIV4 both have unique A.I in a Turn-based system where Even on Emperor, some A.I's don't cheat and still beat your ass...why?

Why? Because Civ IV AI cheats like wild on Emperor. Look in the XMLs and you will see the huge bonuses they get.

On Emperor, they only pay about 85% what you do for stuff, get 2 free defensive units in every city, only pay half support for stuff and can go a lot longer before war weariness sets in.

If a respected game like Civ is willing to allow cheating (I prefer handicapping) to give the players a better experience, why shouldn't Sins?

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I fully understand and agree with the OP. I've only lost one game so far, and that was my first time playing and I kept getting attacked by pirates and the enemy player alternating while having NO clue where everything was.

I have fun with the game, but the AI running away constantly when I bring anything that could compromise their fleet is incredibly frustrating and makes the game ridiculously easy. I can freely pick off their capitol ships as they flee and eventually roll over all of their planets. IF they ever actually fight it can be tough unless I have some enormous fleet, but it's rare that they'll actually make such a stand. I also agree with making it so that if any team holds 3/4 of the map (probably for some period of time to let the other team have a bit of an opportunity to gain some ground).

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