Does the AI Cheat? No, it is just good.

[BeanyUndead]

EDIT: Disregard my OP below. I was observing a small sample of behaviour which was not indicative of the whole game. The question was answered by the forum moderator Cheshyr after consulting with the devs. The AI is actually quite well designed.

OP: I've noticed something in the single player game. The AI seems to react as though it knows your plan, even when that difficulty setting is not selected. You see a soldier running one direction, you set up an ambush and it changes its entire attack based on its knowledge of what you are going to do. It makes fights...not fun.Not only that, it makes it so you can't use your primary assets. I have fired one rocket in five missions because every map it spawns my rocket launcher directly in front of an assult rifle or smg. It's really annoying. The ways you spawn are just strange. Sometimes you spawn well-away from everyone, unless you have a rocket launcher, then it spawns you within a few meters of the enemy and in line of sight. Anyone else experiencing this?

[Goffik]

I've noticed the AI apparently making changes to it's plan based on what I've planned to do myself, yes. I'm undecided as to whether it's very astute predictions on the part of the AI or just plain old cheating to give them a boost. The more I see it the more I think it's the latter, and that isn't cool.

[BeanyUndead]

Originally posted by Goffik:

I've noticed the AI apparently making changes to it's plan based on what I've planned to do myself, yes. I'm undecided as to whether it's very astute predictions on the part of the AI or just plain old cheating to give them a boost. The more I see it the more I think it's the latter, and that isn't cool.

No it isn't cool. If the AI is simply reading your plan and adapting its plans, then there is no way of winning that does not involve trapping it in a no-win senario (which is what I find myself often trying to do). This would be fine if the player could do it too but that is simply not the case (with the possible exception of the first round of stealth-start missions). If the AI's got a plan, it should stick to it unless it notices an obvious problem. I wonder if the devs just had a hard time programing the AI to be intuitive rather than simply adaptive.

[SemtexMan47]

What the AI was doing in the previous turn basically has no bearing on the next. So don't assume they will continue moving a unit in the same direction.

[Goffik]

Originally posted by SemtexMan47:

What the AI was doing in the previous turn basically has no bearing on the next. So don't assume they will continue moving a unit in the same direction.

That's not the issue. I can understand that the AI is calculating it's actions for each turn individually and that's fine... it's what us humans do too. But sometimes the AI reacts to things with an apparent sixth sense, based on information it couldn't possibly have known or really predicted. That's what makes it suspicious.

[Yung Venuz]

They 100% alter their plans based on yours. You can test it most accurately by reverting a turn and changing your plans. I think maybe the implication is that the enemy is reacting in real-time? But then, it doesn't really make sense, with the way long turns work. Not to mention, it doesn't really feel fair.

This is almost ironic, given the city's called "Markov" Geist.

[SemtexMan47]

What I've noticed is the AI will be able to spot the tiniest sliver of openings to get the jump on your unit. Something you may not be able to plan for in under 5 tries. Doable, but tricky. Like if you see an AI is probably going to come around the corner to shoot, so you put the focus on the corner and stay put, he can still get you bc he moved like 2 steps up and then 3 right before sidestepping.

I'm still learning but what I've found is a lot of the time is staying put can be worse than not moving. The AI will still find a way to get you first if even if he's the one moving to you. Could be a bug. I noticed sometimes the stillness factor doesn't work like you think it should.

[BeanyUndead]

Originally posted by SemtexMan47:

What the AI was doing in the previous turn basically has no bearing on the next. So don't assume they will continue moving a unit in the same direction.

Yeah, its not about assuming that. For example, a gunner is moving towards a doorway to flank my unit. I turn my unit away from a nearby window to face the door. The AI immediately aborts the movement towards the door and comes around to the window and kills my vatborn who is now facing in the wrong direction to cover the window like he was a moment before. Is it possible that the AI was ropa-doping me? I doubt it, because had I simple let my unit continue facing the window, it would have continued its flank and shot me through the door. It looks, almost certainly, like the AI is using the information you use to order your troops in calculating its own actions. If this is the case, the player should be able to do that too; although that would produce a fairly dull and slow game. It would be better if the AI employed good strategies rather than simply adapting to the players plans which it should not be able to see anyway.

[BeanyUndead]

Originally posted by Goffik:

Originally posted by SemtexMan47:

What the AI was doing in the previous turn basically has no bearing on the next. So don't assume they will continue moving a unit in the same direction.

That's not the issue. I can understand that the AI is calculating it's actions for each turn individually and that's fine... it's what us humans do too. But sometimes the AI reacts to things with an apparent sixth sense, based on information it couldn't possibly have known or really predicted. That's what makes it suspicious.

Yeah, exactly.

[BeanyUndead]

Originally posted by Yung Venuz:

They 100% alter their plans based on yours. You can test it most accurately by reverting a turn and changing your plans. I think maybe the implication is that the enemy is reacting in real-time? But then, it doesn't really make sense, with the way long turns work. Not to mention, it doesn't really feel fair.

This is almost ironic, given the city's called "Markov" Geist.

I never thought of testing it with save games. Although one time I got the AI in a loop and it could not decide what to do as my plan presented no options. It was almost glitching-out because its ability to cheat was not enough in that case.

[BeanyUndead]

Originally posted by SemtexMan47:

What I've noticed is the AI will be able to spot the tiniest sliver of openings to get the jump on your unit. Something you may not be able to plan for in under 5 tries. Doable, but tricky. Like if you see an AI is probably going to come around the corner to shoot, so you put the focus on the corner and stay put, he can still get you bc he moved like 2 steps up and then 3 right before sidestepping.

I'm still learning but what I've found is a lot of the time is staying put can be worse than not moving. The AI will still find a way to get you first if even if he's the one moving to you. Could be a bug. I noticed sometimes the stillness factor doesn't work like you think it should.

I do agree with you there. Staying put is often bad, but I think its because the AI has difficulty cheating as much if your plans have dynamic elements. It has to calculate where your character will be at a specific moment and it isn't programmed to take such calculations into account as much as 'static variables'.

[RedShadow]

I noticed something strange as well... I was stuck and had to restart multiple times my turn in order to pull out some crazy moves.
Except that each time the AI's turn would be sometimes a little bit different to completely different.
Should not happen, AI's turn must be based on my turn's start and should not be affected to whatever I do during my turn.

Sometimes it feels like I have checked the 'AI knows your plan beforhand' option in SP.
But I did not.

It may not mean the AI is cheating...
Could just be some random seed being reset when it should not.

[L4z3r]

I think mode 7 released a video on how their AI works. I don't think it cheats, but it is pretty good. It takes into account what moved you likely would make, like a person would. Doing the obvious move is generally best avoided. Also, you should not expect it to continue it's behavior from last turn.

[Nuclear Wessel]

The situation that confused me, is that when you are undetected, and can see the AI's plans, the AI will get to change the plans of all its units the very moment you are detected. This seems like cheating at first, but you would be at too massive an advantage if they had to play out the full turn with the old plans.

As for the AI changing plans after loading, I think it just isn't deterministic. I seem to remember in an early developer diary for the game they where showing how the AI worked, and it seemed to be that it generated two different plans the player might carry out and attempted to counter both of those. In order for the system to be able to generate multiple plans from the same state, I would assume it would likely have some degree of randomisation.

[Engineer(1)]

@Yung Venuz

This is not true and the experiment is flawed: the AI will not make the same turn twice even if you just stand there unless they don't see any other way to proceed, which is an exceptional case.

[RedShadow]

@shootist2
I thought the AI would.
Looks like I was wrong, the AI is not deterministic.
It uses a little bit of randomness each time.

Which is weird, because only since recently I could restart a turn and see the AI doing exactly the same thing each time. But not anymore, or not actually every time. I must have been lucky before, that's all I guess.