Does the AI cheats on higher difficulty?

[Opochtli]

I played only the 3 first difficulty so far( i think the hardest was ''risky'') and I don't believe the AI was cheating at all, it was a bit too easy although the risky difficulty seemed fair. Now I want to make the AI harder but I'm worried harder AI just means it will magically spawn doom stacks out of nowhere and create infinite ressources. Any experienced players can tell me how the AI works?

[banetrapperdev]

I play 1 difficulty from hardest, and i do feel it cheats crazy, but i cannot tell how crazy.
If you capture rush stone mine / wood mine day 2-3, make wood/stone production buildings and 0 army to get to "large" unit, as soon as possible, then 3 turns to build the buildings and i spotted an enemy on horizont aproaching.
So i had 2 turns of growth of cannons, i had 2 cannons.

Enemy attack my town with 6x30 upgraded medium unit, and 3x7 of large tier unit.
So they had 2 upgrades to capacity to two types, they somehow produced over 75 turns of medium size units, and 21 turns of large units. And mind you it's not even turn 15.
And somehow walked that across the map to attack me, meaning they had that before turn 10.

But it's usually tamer than this.

[Opochtli]

Originally posted by banetrapperdev:

I play 1 difficulty from hardest, and i do feel it cheats crazy, but i cannot tell how crazy.
If you capture rush stone mine / wood mine day 2-3, make wood/stone production buildings and 0 army to get to "large" unit, as soon as possible, then 3 turns to build the buildings and i spotted an enemy on horizont aproaching.
So i had 2 turns of growth of cannons, i had 2 cannons.

Enemy attack my town with 6x30 upgraded medium unit, and 3x7 of large tier unit.
So they had 2 upgrades to capacity to two types, they somehow produced over 75 turns of medium size units, and 21 turns of large units. And mind you it's not even turn 15.
And somehow walked that across the map to attack me, meaning they had that before turn 10.

But it's usually tamer than this.

feels like they might be cheating ressources early, the worst is when they spawn troops out of thin air, AoW4 did that and I quit the game because of it, felt so cheap.

[Ail]

The AI starts cheating at Challenging (5th difficulty). So there's one more above Risky where it doesn't do so yet.

You can actually look the exact bonuses up under "Tutorials & Codex" very far down. There's a section about AI-difficulty.

[Opochtli]

thank you very much ^^

[DonPete]

i remember reading up how dificulties are measured: basically the higher you go the enemy forces start with extra recourses, have increase xp gain and movement. But it cant cheat out units. I think in challenging it starts with a market place. This is why the AI can get their research up quickly.

[banetrapperdev]

"Worthy" is baseline same as player, no cheats, is difficult, but managable.

Some maps are incompatible with high difficulty AI.
It will start with extra resources 5-10 which HUGE TEMPO start, a free marketplace, it will get extra units growth like 20%, extra income 20-60%, extra resources per turn 20-60%.
And the starting resources let it explode in early growth, while player is stuck so it's littearlly 10 turns ahed of player and each turn it gets almost double resources a player does.

[NeroTheAngel]

of course it cheats. An AI in these games can only play so good so it gets buffs and extra ressources on higher difficulty that you as a player has a challange.

[Samseng Yik]

The AI is only as cheat as the written text in the difficulty selection.
Example unit purchase discount etc

[Ail]

Originally posted by NeroTheAngel:

of course it cheats. An AI in these games can only play so good so it gets buffs and extra ressources on higher difficulty that you as a player has a challange.

From my own experience as hobby-AI-programmer for open-source-games:
With enough time, effort and dedication it is very well in the realms of possible to get the AI to a state where it doesn't have to get extra-resources in order to pose a challenge even for experienced players.

But it's very much an iterative process. You play against the AI to look specifically for it's weaknesses and then work on these. Then you play again to come up with strategies to overcome the improved AI. Something that helps tremendously is if players who are able to beat the AI record themselves doing so. Videos like that are super-helpful for AI-developers. You see whether there's exploits the player uses that you can fix or you see novel strategies employed by the player you simply haven't considered but that are stronger than what you taught to the AI.

I don't proactively improve the AI of Remnants of the Precursors anymore. But recently someone posted a thread where he gave some tips for beating the highest difficulty. I asked him to make a video and he did. While he was playing with some pretty unorthodox game-settings it became clear that the AI played poorly under these conditions. So I adapted certain aspects of it that primarily affect the playstyle under the shown conditions. When he tried again he got beaten up badly and now considers lowering the difficulty.

Unfortunately for commercial games something like that rarely happens. Eventually the developers move on to a new project and don't really invest time into the AI anymore because longevity of your older game is counter-productive when you want to sell a new one.