Indeed, the CPU city spam is a large part of the reason why I don't really play Civ 5 anymore.BloatedGuppy said:The AI actually gets insane bonuses at every difficulty level. It almost completely ignores happiness, for example, leading to infinite city spam. But cheating AI is such a long standing Civ tradition it's almost a game within the game figuring out the ways in which the AI is boning you.Zenn3k said:Its lazy development that leads to this.
One of the worst examples I know of is Civ 5. The computer gets insane bonuses starting from level 5 difficulty.
At the least, the game makes no secret of this, but in a game where the CPU gets benefits at all times...to just pile on more and more as a way to increase difficulty just seems lazy.
The CPU should have to play by the same rules, just improve its decision making instead.
That holds true for previous games, but in Shogun 2 every faction (with only a few exceptions) starts with 1 piece of territory, a couple of 1-star generals en a small military force. It's impossible to get such a force together in 5 turns.BloatedGuppy said:I haven't spent much time with Shogun but that's not necessarily bullshit. Total War games do not start with tabula rasa playing fields ala Civ or other strategy games. For example, if you play Medieval 2 as, say, Venice, and immediately pick a fight with the Holy Roman Empire, you're going to get rolled.GundamSentinel said:Playing Shogun 2 Total War and having an enemy 3-star general with a full stack of units come at me after 5 turns. I call bullshit.
Well, to be fair, I need to establish where I'm coming from. I think Civ's combat has ALWAYS been horrible. As in flat out, laugh out loud embarrassingly bad. The hyper-stack system was even worse than 1 unit per tile, which has all kinds of its own issues but at least isn't ugly/cheesy as fuck. The entire series has never done combat well on any level. Or diplomacy, for that matter, it's always been shite at diplomacy as well.The7Sins said:Yeah I had originally stopped reading the thread to reply to the above quote as you can see. After I went back to read some more I noticed the conversation with DoPo.
Probably for the best. As the only thing 5 does better than 4 is the graphics. But as it is newer that is pretty easy to do.
And I'm not a fanatic about 4. I just hate 5 for gutting what made the series' combat even somewhat realistic and good replacing it with the horrid 1 unit per tile. And as I've seen from reviews they gutted the diplomacy from the previous games down to the bare minimum and made everyone a war monger even Gandhi.
Bleh. I've had an extremely hard time warming to Shogun 2 as it is, and this isn't helping. I hate to use the "streamlined" word in a negative fashion but this is one case where the game seems to have streamlined away its charm.GundamSentinel said:That holds true for previous games, but in Shogun 2 every faction (with only a few exceptions) starts with 1 piece of territory, a couple of 1-star generals en a small military force. It's impossible to get such a force together in 5 turns.
Once I decided to try medieval 2 on hard. I picked Sicily for decent positioning and within 10 turns I was 30k gold in debt because 5 computers decided it would be funny to each send full stack armies to my island without declaring war and just hang out causing devastation. It was kind of like being spawn camped by the computer.GundamSentinel said:Playing Shogun 2 Total War and having an enemy 3-star general with a full stack of units come at me after 5 turns. I call bullshit.
I'm sorry, but that really made me laugh. They were probably just on vacation.LostCrusader said:Once I decided to try medieval 2 on hard. I picked Sicily for decent positioning and within 10 turns I was 30k gold in debt because 5 computers decided it would be funny to each send full stack armies to my island without declaring war and just hang out causing devastation. It was kind of like being spawn camped by the computer.GundamSentinel said:Playing Shogun 2 Total War and having an enemy 3-star general with a full stack of units come at me after 5 turns. I call bullshit.
You know I was just about to say that Driver: San Francisco had some cheating AIs too. I worked really hard to get one of the fastest cars in the game from the second chapter or so meaning I ended up racing against some really bad cars. I won every round against those bad cars with ease, but they would always be just a tiny bit behind me. However it seems like the same thing happens if I lag behind though so it evens out in a way.BloatedGuppy said:It's not just kart racers. Many racers seem to have cheating AI. It's virtually impossible to separate yourself from the pack.Hazy992 said:Probably was. Like you said, cheating AI seems to be a part of kart racers
I had a good laugh about it too because they didn't even fight each other. It was kind of like they decided to have a party at my house without telling me.GundamSentinel said:I'm sorry, but that really made me laugh. They were probably just on vacation.LostCrusader said:Once I decided to try medieval 2 on hard. I picked Sicily for decent positioning and within 10 turns I was 30k gold in debt because 5 computers decided it would be funny to each send full stack armies to my island without declaring war and just hang out causing devastation. It was kind of like being spawn camped by the computer.GundamSentinel said:Playing Shogun 2 Total War and having an enemy 3-star general with a full stack of units come at me after 5 turns. I call bullshit.
Starcraft's AI has to play by the same rules as you, it just has a ludicrous APM since it's a computer. This was demonstrated clearly with Starcraft 2 with the "design an AI that can beat the best humans" contest. Unconventional tactics didn't work, but what did work was emulating the best players, just at very high APM, so while it has to issue commands in strict sequential order, and can only issue commands to the same group sizes as a human, the computer can do absurd micro like separating out flying units to avoid AA splash damage, then clumping them for attacks, then separating them etc so it just wins by sheer speed.Blatherscythe said:Have you ever faced a computer oppenent that you could swear was playing by a different set of rules or knew what moves you were making? I have. I'd decided to break out my dad's copy of Starcraft, and oh my god does the AI in a custom match cheat or at the very least, has an unfair advantage.
The way me and my RTS ethusiest friend figured this out was after a few matches. From the camera angle I thought that there was only one way into my base, which I had fortified with bunkers and missle turrets. Infortunately there was a small path from behind some raised land that the Zerg poured though first try, they never saw the defenses I had set up.
What also raised a few hairs was when I was playing on crystalysis, I was never attacked and made a shitload of defenses, when I roll into the enemy base I see they didn't set a damn thing up aside from the Zerg equivilent to a barracks, because the crystals blocking the path didn't trigger them to make air based units they were simply harvesting resources.
But the worst example came from my latest game. I decided to fight Terrans this time, I had a slight problem with a marine rush when my defences weren't up, but I got my bunkers up. Unfortunately, the AI was aware I haden't build any detectors for some reason (seriously, I haden't been attacked in a good long while) and I kept getting nuked by his fucking ghost. I eventually rage quit when I realized how the game itself helps the AI.
For starters you can only select 12 units at a time and to my knowledge you cannot hotkey different groups, this makes it difficult to use large armies as a human, but the computer shows no issue with controlling large groups. Second of all is the way the computer can do multiple things (IE set up buildings) in what a human could call a single click. Finally it's the way they can use builders, they can set them on different resource nodes in again, a single click. It seems to me that Starcraft was successful for it's multiplayer because the two players have at least the same capabilities as one another.
So what AI in what game to you seems to be cheating or has an advantage a human has no chance of replicating?