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Sorry I'm not trying to argue I think everyone's personal nuances of definition are just as valid I just think it's actually interesting to talk about semantics because I'm a nerd
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Sep 26, 2020 04:53
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The mechanics on the new golden age/dark age seems a bit borked at the moment. Every era change, all the civs that got a dark age immediately lost one city. This city inevitably came back to them as the cultural pressure was too high for another city to grab it. At one point the era tab even told me that I was going into a heroic age, but when the era changed it was just a golden age (I think heroic ages don't exist in that mode). Aside from that, I like to play on Settler difficulty a lot when I just want to gently caress about without care. The barbs will still want to gently caress with everything, and if you spawn next to Sweden/Netherlands/Genghis Khan, they will bumrush you if you neglect your military. Hence why my religion half the time is called "gently caress Sweden".
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Sep 26, 2020 05:18
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Obviously when people say they think the AI is cheating, they're stating a judgement that what the AI is doing is unfair and against some set of rules. Typically these are entirely arbitrary rules set by the player, like homerules to Magic: the Gathering or Monopoly. These are infact not the rules of the actual game, the rules of the actual game are that if you turn the node to "Deity Difficulty" the AI gets an advantage. It is fair because computers are stupid and need advantages to provide a challenge to human problem solving skills. I dunno, this is a really common thing in the community to call the AI getting stuff cheating and it wears on you after a while. It would be nice to see commercially viable AI improvements for games like this regardless but for now this is what we're stuck with. Apologies for starting a dumb argument and being a tad blunt earlier.
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Sep 26, 2020 06:08
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Rimusutera posted:Obviously when people say they think the AI is cheating, they're stating a judgement that what the AI is doing is unfair and against some set of rules. Typically these are entirely arbitrary rules set by the player, like homerules to Magic: the Gathering or Monopoly. Well again I mean you say that's obvious but I can say for me personally it's not what I mean when I say the AI cheats above Prince
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Sep 26, 2020 06:12
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What you've described is called "home/house rules" or something to that effect by normal people. No one I ever met has said "I'll let you cheat" to describe what you have described. These actions are typically mutually agreed upon by all parties.
Rimusutera fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Sep 26, 2020 |
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Sep 26, 2020 06:18
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Rimusutera posted:What you've described is called "home/house rules" or something to that effect by normal people. No one I ever met has said "I'll let you cheat" to describe what you have described. These actions are typically mutually agreed upon by all parties. lol "normal people" gently caress off maybe you didn't mean that to come off as dickish as it did tho Stefan Prodan fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Sep 26, 2020 |
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Sep 26, 2020 06:35
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It's like in the new update notes when it talks about dramatic ages and at Prince level, Dark Ages cause human and AI players to lose an equal amount of cities. Lower difficulty the AI loses more, higher difficulty the human player loses more. So does that mean that its cheating at every level other than Prince, and the player is "cheating" if he selects a lower difficulty setting? I would say not.
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Sep 26, 2020 06:49
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Marmaduke! posted:It's like in the new update notes when it talks about dramatic ages and at Prince level, Dark Ages cause human and AI players to lose an equal amount of cities. Lower difficulty the AI loses more, higher difficulty the human player loses more. So does that mean that its cheating at every level other than Prince, and the player is "cheating" if he selects a lower difficulty setting? I would say not. Yeah fair point, I mean again this is all just like what does it colloquially mean because obviously the computer can't cheat no matter what, it's not a player. I think the player can't cheat by using any ingame options that are part of the normal setup of a game, although the player can cheat by using things like console commands or whatever.
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Sep 26, 2020 06:52
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There's so much we can do that the AI can't I'm impressed that they've managed to program the AI correctly using things like Rock Bands successfully at all. It used to feel like cheating with AI Apostles though, they'd spring up constantly and it felt like the AI shouldn't have been able to afford new ones every single turn.
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Sep 26, 2020 06:59
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Sometimes the AI is smart enough but sometimes you wander over and see them building a Dam right next to the Great Bath and wish it didn’t need quite so many crutches to compete
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Sep 26, 2020 09:02
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ellspurs posted:The mechanics on the new golden age/dark age seems a bit borked at the moment. In my game on King, they lose two per dark age -- I think the two cities with lowest loyalty. The cities do eventually flip, but it's also an opportunity for a neighbor (i.e. me) to snag a city grievance-free. No heroic ages in this mode, but I think your era overflow supercharges your bonus if I'm remembering correctly? Like they were specifically trying to curb the behavior of people holding off doing things to save era score.
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Sep 26, 2020 12:30
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Seeing through the fog of war would be considered 'cheating', as would being allowed infinite gold or to spawn units from nothing. Starting with more stuff than the player on higher difficulties is not (someone correctly called it what it is, an advantage). No one is forcing you to play Deity.
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Sep 26, 2020 21:10
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Touchdown Boy posted:Seeing through the fog of war would be considered 'cheating', as would being allowed infinite gold or to spawn units from nothing. Starting with more stuff than the player on higher difficulties is not (someone correctly called it what it is, an advantage). No one is forcing you to play Deity. So if the AI didn't actually start with the extra settlers but spawned them from nothing periodically would you call that cheating
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Sep 26, 2020 21:25
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All this obsession with "winning" a game is weird. Who cares, just turn off the victories and enjoy a stress-free experience. Or turn it all on and stop whining about "cheating" AI. Doesn't make sense.
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Sep 26, 2020 21:26
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Look, we all know this AI needs a handicap to be competitive. That's what the difficulty setting's about. The whole point of a handicap is to level the playing field. Stop complaining about it or write your own goddamn AI that doesn't need one.
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Sep 26, 2020 21:28
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Wait was anyone here whining or complaining about the AI because I didn't get that impression, I'm just trying to have a discussion about what the word cheat means to people in this context because I think it's interesting If anything I think the AI on deity could stand to cheat more because it's still very bad at the game, I think I can probably win most games on deity without reloading or anything unless I just get a terrible start
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Sep 26, 2020 21:29
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I think it would be more interesting if the AI got a bigger continuous advantage throughout the game, instead of the current situation where it gets a massive headstart and then the human player spends the whole game gradually overtaking the AI. In fact, that's something within my capability to mod. Would anyone be interested in trying that out if I make it?
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Sep 26, 2020 21:35
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Chamale posted:I think it would be more interesting if the AI got a bigger continuous advantage throughout the game, instead of the current situation where it gets a massive headstart and then the human player spends the whole game gradually overtaking the AI. yeah I think that was something I found interesting about deity too is that like you can basically count on the fact that if you ever draw even with the AI you won, it will never like smack you back down or let you un-catch up, originally I thought ah man I'm still so behind but then I learned that yeah it's just about like not being behind by more than a certain amount because you will catch up massively later especially once you get spies and more powerful improvements and synergies I mean it does get some continuous advantage in the form of its extra gold and hammers but you can overcome them with just good city planning
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Sep 26, 2020 21:38
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Stefan Prodan posted:So if the AI didn't actually start with the extra settlers but spawned them from nothing periodically would you call that cheating Of course, you are setting the difficulty at the start of the game so its on you if you want that challenge. If you dont want AI advantaged play Prince like a lot of people do. Full disclosure - I have beaten Deity quite a few times but its obnoxious (Im not that good), so I play Emperor a lot. Chamale posted:I think it would be more interesting if the AI got a bigger continuous advantage throughout the game, instead of the current situation where it gets a massive headstart and then the human player spends the whole game gradually overtaking the AI. This. My biggest gripe is 3 settlers and some builders is too much at the very start for me. The tech lead etc is fine.
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Sep 26, 2020 21:59
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Stefan Prodan posted:So if the AI didn't actually start with the extra settlers but spawned them from nothing periodically would you call that cheating I can't tell if this is 
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Sep 26, 2020 22:21
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Chronojam posted:I can't tell if this is That is how it works right or am I mistaken, that's how someone told me it actually does work
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Sep 26, 2020 22:26
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Stefan Prodan posted:Wait was anyone here whining or complaining about the AI because I didn't get that impression, I'm just trying to have a discussion about what the word cheat means to people in this context because I think it's interesting There's value in having one term for a consensual advantage and another for a non-consensual advantage; for one thing, a consensual advantage is ethical. A handicap is very different from using cheat codes akimbo.
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Sep 26, 2020 22:28
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homullus posted:There's value in having one term for a consensual advantage and another for a non-consensual advantage; for one thing, a consensual advantage is ethical. A handicap is very different from using cheat codes akimbo. Yeah makes sense I just think like I said earlier this is an unusual case because the cpu can never literally actually cheat because it's not a player and for the other reasons people already said so I'm interested in who colloquially allows for it to mean more nuanced things when it comes to the cpu vs what seems to be a lot of people who don't consider that a valid usage at all even informally Like for instance someone mentioned they would consider teleporting units cheating by the cpu but what if the cpu just moved units twice as far? They already produce them twice as fast. I just think it's an interesting discussion of where the lexical line is because I majored in linguistics and I'm a dork, I'm not complaining about the cpu
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Sep 26, 2020 22:31
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One wrinkle that occurred to me to is that I think it's easier to say the AI is "cheating" if it's reactive and not scheduled or constant? Like, if the CPU spawned extra units because it was about to lose a city and not because it had the hammers for them to me that seems more over the line of cheating, or if it gets a settler every time you get a settler instead of on a fixed schedule Basically anything that sort of "punishes" you for doing better at certain points or rubberbanding seems like what I would assume more people would call AI cheating
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Sep 26, 2020 22:38
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Stefan Prodan posted:Yeah makes sense I just think like I said earlier this is an unusual case because the cpu can never literally actually cheat because it's not a player and for the other reasons people already said so I'm interested in who colloquially allows for it to mean more nuanced things when it comes to the cpu vs what seems to be a lot of people who don't consider that a valid usage at all even informally I think, from a purely prescriptivist point, nothing a CPU controlled opponent does can ever be considered cheating, because cheating involves implicitly or explicitly agreeing to a set of rules and subsequently flouting them, and an AI will play the game as it's been programmed to play and is incapable of deviating from the rules it knows. Doubly so in a game like civ, where the difficulty slider is an express option of giving the compute/player a head start and persistent bonuses. More informally, complaints about an AI cheating refer to it not following the rules imposed on the human player, such as ignoring fog of war, spawning extra resources as it needs them, and things of that nature. Basically anything short of a handicap (as the difficulty options in Civ VI are) would be cheating by that metric. I think defining either definition is valid, and there's no real point arguing to define one as "correct," when you can figure out which one a person is using pretty quickly. Personally, I'd prefer the AI cheating to its heart's content if it provided a more interesting challenge. Basically anything that I don't notice it doing is fair game. If it suddenly spawns three crossbowmen as I'm besieging a city, or darts across the map to kill a unit it shouldn't know was there, that'd annoy me because I'd get punished even though I knew I had the advantage, but if it's getting eaten by barbarians or falling way behind on science and gives itself some settlers and campuses under the hood, no skin off my back. I'd much rather resources (both developer time and processing power) be devoted to other aspects of the game than having an AI that tries to compete on the player's terms, but I understand that that is not a universal preference.
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Sep 26, 2020 23:09
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:but if it's getting eaten by barbarians or falling way behind on science and gives itself some settlers and campuses under the hood, no skin off my back. I'd much rather resources (both developer time and processing power) be devoted to other aspects of the game than having an AI that tries to compete on the player's terms, but I understand that that is not a universal preference. rubber-banding is difficult too. part of the reason AIs that get crippled early by bad luck barbarians exist at all is because, this can/will also happen to the player. the difference is, a player will just quit or restart; the AI doesn't have the option to restart or quit and the fact that sometimes this happens is actually good in the sense that it means its occurrence is distributed fairly in the rng. besides, you can barely trust firaxis to properly weight a diplomatic AI, or to regulate how much a single unit contributes to global warming, or indeed even how to roll a starting position. you can't really trust them to be able to write a script that determines if a swamped AI requries some rubber banding, can you? lol that said, the AI might be able to see through fog of war but it actually takes into consideration that it's not "supposed" to be able to see everything, which i always thought was kind of weird but cool. this is why even though it "knows" you have a huge amount of troops hiding just outside the fog of war on its border in order to make strategic decisions, it's not permitted to call you out on it or generate suspicion until it can ACTUALLY see your units per the game rules.
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Sep 26, 2020 23:24
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The biggest issues are when you engage with the mechanics and the AI doesn't seem to be affected, especially when it's not spelled out for you. Even if the AI works off a different set of rules, you'd want outcomes to mirror what happens to a human player if possible. In other words, don't require the AI to perfectly manage a mechanic like happiness, but pillaging luxuries should inflict some low-happiness style setbacks on the AI even if it never had a happiness score internally.
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Sep 26, 2020 23:35
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Stefan Prodan posted:So if the AI didn't actually start with the extra settlers but spawned them from nothing periodically would you call that cheating A good query, if the game stated it would happen I would accept it - in fact I'd probably prefer them getting extra settlers throughout the game compared to the original extras! But if the AI could just spawn the settlers outta nowhere and teleport them to the exact spot that you were about to settle then that would be a frustration too far. How about military emergencies? They almost always seem to be called against the human player, they're pretty tough to stop and usually result in several AIs going to war with you. And they definitely suck. Do you think of that as cheating too?
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Sep 27, 2020 00:04
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Marmaduke! posted:A good query, if the game stated it would happen I would accept it - in fact I'd probably prefer them getting extra settlers throughout the game compared to the original extras! But if the AI could just spawn the settlers outta nowhere and teleport them to the exact spot that you were about to settle then that would be a frustration too far. Yeah I think that touches on what I was thinking about a little while ago that things that are reactive like the cpu swooping in with a settler only because you were about to use one would be cheating Emergencies I don't because I feel like I see them called against the cpu fairly often? If we took your premise as a given that they were like only called against the human I'm not sure I would call that cheating still, the AI for instance always gangs up on you at a certain point in shogun 2 to stop you from snowballing and I never thought of that as it cheating
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Sep 27, 2020 00:07
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Stefan Prodan posted:Wait was anyone here whining or complaining about the AI because I didn't get that impression, I'm just trying to have a discussion about what the word cheat means to people in this context because I think it's interesting Cheating is breaking the rules. The AI getting advantages on higher difficulties is part of the ruleset.
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Sep 27, 2020 00:12
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Marmaduke! posted:How about military emergencies? They almost always seem to be called against the human player, they're pretty tough to stop and usually result in several AIs going to war with you. And they definitely suck. Do you think of that as cheating too? this could be a chicken-and-egg problem; the question is, why does the AI call emergencies against human players? the answer is probably, because the human player own and runs the most efficient and dangerous army in the game, and probably holds 10x more captured cities than computer players are capable of doing with their semi-arbitrary AI. the bulk of the AI's snap or tactical decisions are actually derived from the RNG, which is why if you play with New Random Seed you'll see them choose different pantheons, construct different buildings, queue different moves, etc. the AI can be improved if that's changed. but that's probably also why the game runs so smoothly to begin with: actually making informed decisions is process-intensive and basing mundane decisions on the RNG is a cheap, and a cheap, solution
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Sep 27, 2020 00:13
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Ratios and Tendency posted:Cheating is breaking the rules. Right so I assume it's fair to say you'd be in the group that would say you can only say cheating if you mean it literally and nothing the cpu can ever do can be called cheating? Or are you just saying it's possible for a cpu to cheat but this particular game's CPU doesn't, in your opinion
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Sep 27, 2020 00:23
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I'm more of a builder type player, usually going for a cultural win. And as a result, I almost never get an emergency called on me. But so what if I did? As far as I have seen, the AI civs rarely succeed in their emergency alliances against an AI. So what chance would they have against me? I mean, I often play the Cree, who can get great vision across the map, so I watch these so-called assaults. It would be a very odd situation where such stuff would succeed against a human player, barring a highly unusual combination of other factors.
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Sep 27, 2020 00:23
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ShelticRule posted:I mean, I often play the Cree, who can get great vision across the map, so I watch these so-called assaults. It would be a very odd situation where such stuff would succeed against a human player, barring a highly unusual combination of other factors. you see what i mean then right! the AI isn't capable of mounting an effective assault because of its arbitrary tendencies. actually, the closer they get to the target, the more likely they are to gently caress up--this is because an AI is capable of queueing a destination tile with a reasonable amount of long-term intelligence, but its short-term tactical ability is awful. e: and the closer it gets to its target, the more likely it is that its queue will get cancelled because the tile it wanted to move to is now blocked. it's not uncommon to see things like ranged units and melee units shuffling themselves impotently around a city because Archer A wants to move to Warrior C's tile, and it wants to advance Warrior C forward as well, but the rng dictates, "move Archer A first this turn." oops! Fur20 fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Sep 27, 2020 |
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Sep 27, 2020 00:27
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Emergencies are cheating because the AI loves to call them right after giving up cities in a peace deal, making them declare war in violation of the 10-turn truce rule.  E: (Just for the sake of clarity, this isn't actually cheating; it is a game mechanic I find frustrating) Zulily Zoetrope fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Sep 27, 2020 |
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Sep 27, 2020 00:28
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Ha, that's a good example, it almost is literally cheating (but isn't really  ). Besides, the big pain of these military emergencies isn't so much having to fight a war, it's no longer being at peace and getting the trade benefits, or the AI deciding to steal your city states, stuff like that.
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Sep 27, 2020 00:34
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Holy crap the early production power of Gaul + sword equiv units from the start is really really good.
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Sep 27, 2020 01:53
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Stefan Prodan posted:lol "normal people" gently caress off It was unnecessarily flippant in context and my point could have been served with a better choice of words. John F Bennett posted:All this obsession with "winning" a game is weird. Who cares, just turn off the victories and enjoy a stress-free experience. Or turn it all on and stop whining about "cheating" AI. People still derive frustration from the AI's competency or advantages stopping them from accomplishing their in-game personal goals. I'm not sure how turning off victory conditions stops that. Stefan Prodan posted:Wait was anyone here whining or complaining about the AI As I alluded to earlier, even if this wasn't the intention of anyone actually in this thread, "the AI cheats" is a common attempt at criticizing the game and I find it a poor and overdone one, hence my dismissiveness. As to the semantics/phrasing argument that's still ongoing, I stand by that it doesn't make sense to call it cheating. Someone getting an advantage as per the rules is a thing in all manner of competitive games and sports, when that happens no one calls those advantages cheating.
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Sep 27, 2020 03:37
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One thing I dislike about the AI difficulty as it currently stands is that on higher difficulties the player realistically has no chance of getting many of the earlygame wonders because of how the frontloaded advantages work, along with the AI's build preferences. I'd like there to be a mode that feels challenging to play but also I might get to build around Machu Pichu for example.
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Sep 27, 2020 06:41
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Blasmeister posted:One thing I dislike about the AI difficulty as it currently stands is that on higher difficulties the player realistically has no chance of getting many of the earlygame wonders because of how the frontloaded advantages work, along with the AI's build preferences. I'd like there to be a mode that feels challenging to play but also I might get to build around Machu Pichu for example. yeah I have actually gotten macchu picchu on deity before but it's just sometimes the AI just mysteriously decides it doesn't give a poo poo about a wonder and I never know why
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Sep 27, 2020 06:46
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