Cheating AI in Singleplayer?

[Nimbusᴼᴸᴳᴵ]

Really now, is the AI getting unfair buffs in SP, even though the difficulty says there are none? I'm grinding as hell and the AI still is able to be two Ages ahead and stuff, while owning giant armies, which does not make any sense.

[Moby D1СК The SЗМЗН Whale]

Which difficulty are you playing? In metropolis, than it is your skill issue, as on empire AI never goes faster than me

[Max Sprin]

Unstable short confusing trade and very illogical annoying cheating in SP were the two main reasons I quit playing this game. The game it self is great and beautiful. It is just not fun under such circumstances.

[Nimbusᴼᴸᴳᴵ]

Originally posted by Moby D1СК The SЗМЗН Whale:

Which difficulty are you playing? In metropolis, than it is your skill issue, as on empire AI never goes faster than me

Regular, so I think it was metropolis. But so far this only happened when I was playing 1V1. With more empires, it seemed to be increasingly more balanced.

[LFVOmega]

Originally posted by Max Sprin:

Unstable short confusing trade and very illogical annoying cheating in SP were the two main reasons I quit playing this game. The game it self is great and beautiful. It is just not fun under such circumstances.

I turned off fog of war and watched the AI spawn units out of thin air.

[DNLH]

Which AI? IPs? Yeah. Other Empires? They tend to blast through their gold reserves for unit production when they need an ad hoc army.

I won't categorically claim that they're not given units, but I did not see it happen playing around Empire difficulty.

[PenguinO]

I shared an evidence of plausible AI cheating on discord few days ago
https://discord.com/channels/227126593754103810/613079566784790564/1139756180294611045
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/613079566784790564/1139756179959054427/image.png

AI also move earlier than any player during start of a game

However, AI is meant to be camped at spawn point as gold bank for player because stuff in game have absurd pricing on endless pace

[Aluminum Elite Master]

Originally posted by LFVOmega:

Originally posted by Max Sprin:

Unstable short confusing trade and very illogical annoying cheating in SP were the two main reasons I quit playing this game. The game it self is great and beautiful. It is just not fun under such circumstances.

I turned off fog of war and watched the AI spawn units out of thin air.

This.

The CPU players have to be cheating their backsides off from what I am seeing.


Several areas of high, high concern:

Vassals just happen out of nowhere. Most recent game, one CPU is vassalizing everyone... gets to a player I can see is on a continent by themselves, and vassalizes them, too. They were the same size, even. So, vassalizing is not obeying any rules at all anymore, because I am constantly seeing one CPU vassalize all the rest (maybe this is intentionally done to push the DLC for world congress, which I don't have). Sides just instantly vassalize from what I can tell, without losing in a war once or twice first. No exchange of casualties, or cities, in the process. Just poof, now one is a liege and the other a vassal.

CPU units... this is nutty. Right after one gets out of the hunt/gather phase and becomes a culture, I take out all the units I can see of theirs. They only have one city. 15 turns later, they have 6 stacks of four. 24 units in 15 turns from one city...that doesn't seem right. Happens even on Metropolis now. It really does look like they get freebie units scripted to appear, and it's especially suspicious because the same stack is occuring way too often. Most recent game, I think every single stack I saw was two swordsmen, one archer, one horse. That defies probability, that a CPU would magically make every stack the exact same and not have, say, one rushed out that ended up being four swords or four archers or whatever.

Lastly, city cap is getting ignored pretty easily... CPU player has 8 cities on turn 230 of Endless. On Metropolis. Doesn't seem to phase them at all, just rolls with it and must be eating an intense influence penalty every single turn.


To me, certain things look like cheating even on diff. levels that don't indicate much bonus or any at all. And it's not just persona boosts from the CPU players... even taking those onboard, there appears to be wild, rampant CPU boosts now.

[The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales]

I'm not an AI programmer or designers, and it's been a while since I last got to sit down to talk to them, but let me try to speak about some of the claims made in this thread.

• AI acts before the player: Yes, it's a problem, I won't deny it. We've taken steps some steps to mitigate it, but it continues to frustrate players, and I understand that. However, we felt that there were more important improvements to be worked on by our AI team.
• AI has about 100 Fame in the neolithic: To me, that looks like the AI simply coming across two natural wonders. To my knowledge, the AI does not beeline towards natural wonders, though to be sure I'd need to ask our AI team. I can tell you, though, that I've had it happen the other way around as well, with me being the lucky plaer to come across the wonders.
• Vassalage happening out of nowhere: As far as I know, the AI is not intentionally programmed for this behavior. However, depending on the war support at the start of the war and the war support changes, it is possible for a war to end quickly even without battles. That said, it is also possible that something is off in the "war evaluation" of the AI (either in general or for specific AI personalities) and they give up too readily. So if you see this, I'd appreciate if you could share a save so we have a situation we can investigate.
• AI colluding against the player in general: I don't think our AI is coded with any anti-player bias, and as far as I have been told our AI does not even get access to the information whether any particular empire is controlled by a human or another AI.
• AI creating way too many units: As of the last update that improved the AI's management of Influence and Money, we noticed that many AIs spend the majority of their gold on buyout out unit production, leading them to create vast standing armies "out of nowhere" (and because of the reduced population in their cities, they perpetually operate at the fast growth speed of small cities). Last I heard, this behavior should be addressed in the upcoming update, but if you continue to observe the AI cranking out huge armies even on Metropolis after that update releases, please let us know (again, ideally with a save so we can pick the AI's brain.)
• AI armies all having the same composition: As I said, I am not an AI programmer/designer, but as far as I understand, the Humankind AI handles unit construction "by army" rather than by individual units: If it feels too weak, it decides to build an entire army based on a template. (I may be wrong here, though, and would need to follow up with the AI team to be sure.)
• City cap being ignored: This one I would actually consider a problem... The AI does not get to ignore the city cap (though on high difficulties it may receive some bonuses that allow it to cope with it), so many times the AI are are in fact suffering a big influence penalty, which at best slows them down, at worst leads to constant rebellion in their land from the stability penalty. Again, if you have saves of this happening, I'd be glad to see them and poke at what the AI is doing.

Now, as I mentioned before, I'm not part of the AI team, so I cannot guarantee I understood or remembered any specific aspect of all this correctly. I can try to follow up with the AI team on anything specific, though I can't promise a quick reply, as they're quite busy teaching the AI the new poaching feature.

[Aluminum Elite Master]

Thanks for the heads-up.

Wars ending without actual battles is I think the main issue I am seeing leading to abrupt vassalization. That's what I think I am seeing, because two sides that don't seem to even be able to easily access each other (across a handful of ocean tiles earlier on, on separate continents) are sometimes becoming liege/vassal almost instantaneously.

Some of the other issues are maybe less important, but wars ending without a battle, resulting in a *vassal* state, seems like something not intended. That's a significant problem, because that means a side that was never realistically even able to reach the other still somehow didn't just pay war reparations, but got vassalized?

Again: war support alone really, really shouldn't lead to a vassal state... I feel like that needs a re-work, because I would get taking war reparations without a battle, or taking a single territory, but vassalizing the entire faction off of no battles doesn't really make sense gameplay-wise because being vassalized should be the 2nd worst result for the loser, short of just total annexation. Since vassalizing everyone is a win condition, it should be harder to vassalize than it currently is.

[The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales]

I agree it can feel a bit weird, and I admit it probably happens too often between AI and may be too easy overall (overcompensating for it being much too difficult initially, perhaps).
But it's worth noting: Vassalizing may not be the worst fate outside of annihilation: Vassalizing all over players is an end condition, not a win condition. If you can beat your liege in Fame at the end, you will still be considered the victor. Meanwhile, you will benefit from trade with them (especially in the new naval update, where Vassal-Liege resource sharing happens through proper international trade routes, so they trigger all bonuses keying of that), and you benefit from their protection (even if they are not actually more powerful than you, it can still serve as a one-sided alliance to deter others.)
The big downside is the lack of diplomatic independence, really, which our players felt keenly with the Against All Odds scenario, where they consideried submission to the most powerful enemy the best way to approach the sceanrio, but it often led to their liege giving away their land in an attempt to keep the peace.

Vassalization as a whole has received a lot of feedback and a lot of interesting suggestions from our players, but unfortunately overhauling it was always "out of scope", at least when compared to other improvements that could be made for the same effort.

[Nimbusᴼᴸᴳᴵ]

Originally posted by The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales:

I'm not an AI programmer or designers, and it's been a while since I last got to sit down to talk to them, but let me try to speak about some of the claims made in this thread.

• AI acts before the player: Yes, it's a problem, I won't deny it. We've taken steps some steps to mitigate it, but it continues to frustrate players, and I understand that. However, we felt that there were more important improvements to be worked on by our AI team.
• AI has about 100 Fame in the neolithic: To me, that looks like the AI simply coming across two natural wonders. To my knowledge, the AI does not beeline towards natural wonders, though to be sure I'd need to ask our AI team. I can tell you, though, that I've had it happen the other way around as well, with me being the lucky plaer to come across the wonders.
• Vassalage happening out of nowhere: As far as I know, the AI is not intentionally programmed for this behavior. However, depending on the war support at the start of the war and the war support changes, it is possible for a war to end quickly even without battles. That said, it is also possible that something is off in the "war evaluation" of the AI (either in general or for specific AI personalities) and they give up too readily. So if you see this, I'd appreciate if you could share a save so we have a situation we can investigate.
• AI colluding against the player in general: I don't think our AI is coded with any anti-player bias, and as far as I have been told our AI does not even get access to the information whether any particular empire is controlled by a human or another AI.
• AI creating way too many units: As of the last update that improved the AI's management of Influence and Money, we noticed that many AIs spend the majority of their gold on buyout out unit production, leading them to create vast standing armies "out of nowhere" (and because of the reduced population in their cities, they perpetually operate at the fast growth speed of small cities). Last I heard, this behavior should be addressed in the upcoming update, but if you continue to observe the AI cranking out huge armies even on Metropolis after that update releases, please let us know (again, ideally with a save so we can pick the AI's brain.)
• AI armies all having the same composition: As I said, I am not an AI programmer/designer, but as far as I understand, the Humankind AI handles unit construction "by army" rather than by individual units: If it feels too weak, it decides to build an entire army based on a template. (I may be wrong here, though, and would need to follow up with the AI team to be sure.)
• City cap being ignored: This one I would actually consider a problem... The AI does not get to ignore the city cap (though on high difficulties it may receive some bonuses that allow it to cope with it), so many times the AI are are in fact suffering a big influence penalty, which at best slows them down, at worst leads to constant rebellion in their land from the stability penalty. Again, if you have saves of this happening, I'd be glad to see them and poke at what the AI is doing.

Now, as I mentioned before, I'm not part of the AI team, so I cannot guarantee I understood or remembered any specific aspect of all this correctly. I can try to follow up with the AI team on anything specific, though I can't promise a quick reply, as they're quite busy teaching the AI the new poaching feature.

One thing I always have been wondering about: Does the AI react to your army composition? Oftentimes I had the impression, the AI would pick particular units or even cultures just to counter my units. The latter is probably rather random, but the AI picking exactly the units to counter me in any situation is something that I observed many times, as long as the country of the AI is at the same pace or even better than the player (AI is basically broken after they had been vassilized).