AI heavily cheating?

[Azrael]

I just bought the game and it appears to me, the AI gets incredibly lucky with dice rolls and card draws and so far I haven't won a single time in several matches.
Or is it just heavily rigged against the US? Or both?

If I get shown like 80+x% chance that nothing will happen on Re-Alignment rolls, since I have nothing around such targets, yet the Soviets go around and pull these off on a regular basis, this seems deeply ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up.

[Benkyo]

The AI does not cheat, but the game is designed to favour the USSR in the early war.

Balanced matches against human opponents usually give 2 extra starting influence to the US player.

If you learn the game, you will find yourself able to beat the AI every single time, no matter how unlucky the dice rolls (maybe 1 in 1000 games the dice and cards might combine to make things unwinnable, I suppose).

[Azrael]

Yeah, I was a bit aggravated after loosing several matches in a row, when I wrote this.
Today after a good night's sleep and reading tips and stuff, I tried again and won as US in early mid war.

I think key to my victory was denying the Soviets from couping anywhere in Asia or Middle East by being ultra aggressive myself with coups, e.g. I couped Iraq as one of my first actions, thus throwing the soviets out of the majority of the Middle East early.
I've used the China Card to flip Thailand back to me with Influence, when Soviets went into it early with two Influence and I countercouped them, when they couped me in South America over Columbia, two times!
And I acted on a hint I saw in a video, that to not try to dominate the regions but just keeping the balance.
Except South America, In the final turn of that match I had to countercoup them so aggressively there over Colombia, because I had the South America Scoring and that card in the end granted me victory over them.

[Bro-ski]

Honestly the AI has correctly guessed the scoring card in my hand numerous times and has shown a preference to always take whatever action will hinder me the most, as if they can always see my entire hand.

[Benkyo]

The AI will prefer regions that can score, but it shows no preference for cards you hold. It will also nearly always try to switch a region from your dominance -> tie -> AI dominance, with very little or no consideration to how inefficient or hopeless such actions are.

If you are on the back foot, or reasonably even in board state, the AI actions can seem "intelligent" (or even "prescient", if you are very new to the game), but as soon as the AI is on the back foot, it starts to flail about in increasingly desperate and nonsensical ways.

Basically, the better you get, the worse the AI gets, which goes some way towards explaining how much the solo experience diverges between new and experienced players.

[kca77]

Yes, I kind of got the feeling the AI had an edge beyond the fact they were playing the USSR and I was playing the US. There were just too many situations where either the dice or the cards went heavily against me. Admittedly, it's been a few years and I'm just getting back into Twilight Struggle and my skill level is fairly weak. But still, when you get 3 scoring cards on the first turn and 2 or lower on the rest of the cards and the AI is loaded with 3/4 cards, you just got the feeling that something is working against you. By the time I got to the 2nd turn, there were so many fires to put out, I was already pretty much finished. I'll try playing the Soviets and see if my luck is any better.

[kca77]

I'm really beginning to wonder. Yes, I won a game playing the USSR, with a heavy handicap in my favorite. But I played another game where I couped Columbia 4 times and was never able to knock out the US forces there, even using 2 point influence cards. Twice the US played coups against Columbia and both times threw a 5 or 6. I purposely played six times on the space race (I realize that it's a poor strategy, but just to prove a point), one time just needing 1 VP to win the game. I failed on all 6 rolls. All 6! The combination of rolling 1's or 2's four straight times in Columbia coups and rolling 4 or greater 6 consecutive times on space race rolls, plus the AI's penchant for rolling 5 or 6 on it's coup rolls. I don't know. I'm a pretty unlucky person, but that's a lot of bad luck.

[bylandt11]

I've been playing this game for quite a while and have also grown convinced the AI cheats a bit. What always strikes me most is the sheer value in ops of the cards the AI gets on its first turn. Often 3 and 4 ops cards, while the player gets 1 and 2.

Then again, as Benkyo says, you will almost always still be able to win in the end. There's some satisfaction in getting behind and slowly clawing your way up to victory. One of the very few times I lost was when I got 3 defcon lowering cards in one hand and found no way of disposing of them.

[william.nance]

Yes the AI heavily cheats, but not consistently. I say this as I have seen it make moves that only make sense if if knows what you have. For instance, as the US I play defectors, and the AI soviets then plays 5 year plan - which only makes sense if it knows that the event won't happen. Additionally, a region has been a backwater for all game. I get the scoring card for that region, and all of a sudden the AI does an all out blitz to remove me from the region and anywhere even close to the region. Or there was the time I was up by 14 points and then got FOUR scoring cards in one draw. At the end of that my point advantage had swung to a negative. Honestly, I got it - I'm not that good at the game. But when I am routinely getting my butt handed to me by unlikely events, it makes the game not fun.

[YhofChaerkh]

Specific responses to above points (neither to attack or support them, just neutral observations from my playing the game since 2012):

1. A perceived "bad dice rolls" or "bad card draws" pattern may be an issue of confirmation bias, since we all naturally tend to be more greatly discouraged by a crummy roll than we are reassured by a good roll. My understanding of the randomization is that it's actually harder to code a tilted randomized system to favor the AI side than it is to code a purely random one, and TS' dice rolls and card drawing mechanics are pretty close to what a purely random generator would produce.

2. Getting 3 scoring cards or very low-point cards are unfortunately a part of the game design. I don't like them either, but they do occur (and have even occurred in an International TS Tournament in Turn 1 for a player, who then very predictably lost the game). This could be an argument that the game is poorly designed, or designed with so much swinginess that it doesn't deserve championship tournaments, etc. But I would not impugn the digital app for this, since it's been a constant feature in the hardcopy board game from the start.

2.5 The low-point cards is especially egregious, since if you are unlucky enough to draw a low-point card, then you've thinned out the deck and your opponent is more likely to draw a higher-point card. Some TS fans I know have come up with a "High Deck" and "Low Deck" drawing mechanic to try to help both players get more even-powered cards, but it's finicky and in any case it's a problem with the original game design, not the game software.

3. When the AI decides to focus on a region that it had previously ignored: note that the software version of the game clearly marks which regions have already been scored and whose Scoring Cards are clearly in the discard pile - there's a little bulls-eye target icon beside the region name to show it's gone. (If anything returns the SCs back into the draw deck, that little icon vanishes, to show it's potentially scoreable again.) This interface feature was not present in the original hardcopy version of the game, and players had to mentally keep note of which cards had gone into discard. The discard pile is usually (though not always) reshuffled into the deck at two distinct turns: at the start of Turn 3, and at the start of Turn 7 (although sometimes if the China Card passes back and forth a lot, the Turn 7 reshuffle might be skipped). Human players can therefore predict with high confidence the composition of about half your cards in your hand at the start of Turn 3, and a similar level of card confidence at the start of Turn 7. The AI probably doesn't count cards, but it does keep an eye on which regions have been scored, and it usually tries to play to strengthen its position in unscored regions.

In my experience, if you're having trouble fighting the AI, be aware of a few clear weaknesses in its behavior (which you should not get too complacent with, since humans won't have these weaknesses):

- The AI tends to play influence into breaking Battleground control purely to reduce the scoring advantage of a region. It doesn't play long term, but plays round by round. So where a human might play all 4 points of a strong card into one BG to control or set up threat of control in a later round, the AI will more likely use the 4 points to break two separate BGs, meaning you can easily recapture them by spending a measly 2 influence next action round. Skilled humans don't do this.

- The AI tends to stop putting influence into countries once it achieves bare control, which means it's easy for a human to break AI control and maybe even set up a takeover to flip the country. Skilled humans will usually over-control vulnerable BG states (e.g. putting 3 influence into Thailand instead of 2) to make the cost of breaking their control prohibitively high. Sometimes skilled humans will also over-control one non-battleground state in the region to prevent easy loss of Domination scoring.

- The AI is extremely negligent towards an auto-defeat by losing full control of Europe. Skilled humans are so sensitive to the auto-loss condition of enemy Control of all European BGs, that they tend to react very quickly to such threats and as such humans almost never achieve European Control victories against each other. The AI for whatever reason has a huge blind spot to European Control (perhaps because it was trained on a library of games where humans never even attempted such a long shot victory condition).

If you're having difficulty, the main three beginner tips for general Action Round prioritization:

1. Prioritize your position in regions that have not yet been discarded to the discard pile;
2. Prioritize putting influence into BG states over non-BG states;
3. Prioritize putting influence into empty states over contested states.

This is on top of more general Turn-based advice, such as "try to coup at least once" and "be careful of cards that degrade DEFCON", etc.

[Panthaz89]

Originally posted by Benkyo:

The AI will prefer regions that can score, but it shows no preference for cards you hold. It will also nearly always try to switch a region from your dominance -> tie -> AI dominance, with very little or no consideration to how inefficient or hopeless such actions are.

If you are on the back foot, or reasonably even in board state, the AI actions can seem "intelligent" (or even "prescient", if you are very new to the game), but as soon as the AI is on the back foot, it starts to flail about in increasingly desperate and nonsensical ways.

Basically, the better you get, the worse the AI gets, which goes some way towards explaining how much the solo experience diverges between new and experienced players.

The AI always knows what scoring cards are in your hand...its blatantly obvious. There could be several scoring regions open and it will pretty much focus on the one in your hand the entire turn even if you break control in a different region. The AI definitely cheats but the fact that it constantly wastes IP to break control makes the bidding wars easy most of the time.

[Benkyo]

That is... not what happens.

[YhofChaerkh]

Originally posted by Panthaz89:

The AI always knows what scoring cards are in your hand...its blatantly obvious.

The AI doesn't even know what Scoring Cards it's got in its own hand, sometimes. I've seen the AI play a load of Action Rounds and then straight up auto-lose the game because it held a Scoring Card.

[Panthaz89]

Originally posted by YhofChaerkh:

Originally posted by Panthaz89:

The AI always knows what scoring cards are in your hand...its blatantly obvious.

The AI doesn't even know what Scoring Cards it's got in its own hand, sometimes. I've seen the AI play a load of Action Rounds and then straight up auto-lose the game because it held a Scoring Card.

I've only seen this happen thanks to Ask not what your country can do for you since it can easily leave them with more scoring cards available than they can play.

[YhofChaerkh]

Originally posted by Panthaz89:

Originally posted by YhofChaerkh:

The AI doesn't even know what Scoring Cards it's got in its own hand, sometimes. I've seen the AI play a load of Action Rounds and then straight up auto-lose the game because it held a Scoring Card.

I've only seen this happen thanks to Ask not what your country can do for you since it can easily leave them with more scoring cards available than they can play.

Yeah, Ask Not... can do that even to a thinking human player, to say nothing of the AI.

Not to invalidate your experience, but I've seen the AI self-lose games by holding scoring cards often enough that it's clearly a flaw in its programming. I'd say maybe 10 times in total? Out of 1000+ games.