Does the AI cheat?

[BOT]

Does the AI cheat?
let me clearify. I play a lot. a lot of games.
Anno back when it was on CD.. then 1404 / 2070 and now this one. and tons of ohter and similair games.

The AI is settling a second citie litterly 5 to 10 min after the game started.. i am still tryed to grow my farmers and gatter wood and they are already at tier 2 citiezen and on top of it they start spamming steal factory and colognize another ireland. another 5 to 10 min and they already went to expedition and got their ireland in the new world..

i could not buy so much steal..
i tryed hard.. realy.. in my kontor i click on buy steal-beam to max and send one ship to Mr. Blake. and i was not able to gater 5 steal beams and the AI hase already a second ireland.
how in the world is that possible.

on top of it they start buying shares .. 20 min in the game.. how the f .. k.. who the hell designt it that way.
i bet not even an proffessional player could keep up with that speed. you cant even chop wood that fast ..

but i dont want to play against easy AI.. they are way to easy and boring. i normaly like a good challenge.. against 2 hard AI and dificulty settings high.. but i tryed difficulty settings on low and it is still not possible.

[Chaosium]

They absolutely do, you just need to play with Mercier to be sure of it

They don't care about money, resources, influence, none of that. They just pretend to play and offer to buy goods but they can just get to engineers on 1 island without setting foot in the NW, have 6 steelworks on the same island, spam dozens of shore defenses, they don't even try to hide it

[Primigenia]

yes

[jhendriks87]

It is probably the one let down this game has. If the AI had to follow the rules, it would make it much better. especially warfare. At the moment you can blockade a city and it will never lose population or happiness due to lack of resources. It just magically keeps restocking.

[KingKickAss]

Yeah it cheats, same with 2070. They're simply opponents and forces for you to interact with, not supposed to represent other actual players.

[skeletal creacher]

Yep, coming to this realization has utterly killed my motivation for this game, like why even bother if it doesn't play against the same rules as you? I hope some kind of mod comes out that makes the difficulty settings more fair and less artificial

[Bescherelle]

You can always use "cheat" mods that make life much easier for you.
Or if you wanna suffer more and have bigger challenge, you can make AIs even more powerful and more overpowered.

[BOT]

Originally posted by Bescherelle:

You can always use "cheat" mods that make life much easier for you.
Or if you wanna suffer more and have bigger challenge, you can make AIs even more powerful and more overpowered.

i always like a good challenge and play on hardcore mode .. BUT in most games it is possible to win.. this here is not possible to survive..

it is designt that way so people think ohh i can buy a DLC to make it more easy/convinient.

it is still a good and beatiful game.. but it hase it problems.

[Bescherelle]

It is possible to win against those 3-star AIs cheaty boys, but it can't be done by pure luck, you need to micro-manage efficiently everything, know what the AIs like and dislike so you avoid pissing them off too much and get dragged in an all-out war with all of them. It is doable, but you have to know the game well beforehand. Most DLCs won't help you against them, but the docklands or the seeds of change are game changers as they help you even if you can't have lots of islands.
I don't deny it has problems though, but if what you want is an easier time, play with 1-star AIs.

[ElPrezCBF]

Or you can disable AIs but balance game challenge by increasing the difficulty of other settings when customizing your game. When the AI cheats, I consider it pointless to "challenge" yourself with it since they don't play by the same rules. Even in other games, AIs do not "cheat" by not obeying the rules and typically only get resource bonuses. Game challenge should not be defined solely by how good the AI is but by how any custom settings are selected or whether mods are added to present a challenge. This coming from a fan of survival city builders where the challenge comes mainly from the environment rather than AIs although Anno doesn't focus mainly on survival.

[City Builder]

Somebody told me on this forum, the AI plays by its own rules not what the player has to play by.