Fishy AI

[mickmca]

I wonder if the AI is set up to punish players for using cheats.

First off, the AI has some very suspicious advantages. I realized that opponents across the map were finding me suspiciously quickly, and usually attacking with overwhelming force -- as many as 20 cav and 50 infantry -- in the time it took me to assemble 20-30 soldiers. So I started using the resource cheats to see if I could outrun them. In fact, in one game at the conclusion, even though I had pulled up 12,000 extra of all four resources, one AI opponent outscored me at a rate of 2:1. He also had twice as many infantry and three times as many cavalry. The only place I had outrun him was in mapping, which I always emphasize.

i don't mind a few boosts to strengthen the AI players, but when I get creamed by AI set to Easy, in spite of piling on resources and rushing every advantage in Research, something is not right.

[WhiteTreePaladin]

I believe all the AI difficulties see the entire map as I don't think AI scouting has been implemented yet. Also, pretty sure that the very hardest difficulty does get bonus resources. The AI tends to train smaller batch sizes (groups of 3, etc.) that the player cannot generally train. Beyond that, I'm not aware of additional advantages (although there might be some). I don't think that using the cheat codes has any affect on the AI.

Edited July 22, 2017 by WhiteTreePaladin

[LordGood]

Isn't difficulty controlled by a gather rate bonus with standard difficulty being a 100% gather rate? I think the easy bot is crippled to a 75% gather rate.

[fcxSanya]

3 hours ago, LordGood said:

Isn't difficulty controlled by a gather rate bonus with standard difficulty being a 100% gather rate?

Yes, as the bot description says:

Quote

The AI has a bonus/penalty on resource stockpiling (either gathering rate or trade gain) varying from -50% for Sandbox to +60% for Very Hard (Medium 0%). In addition, the Sandbox level does not expand nor attack.

 

3 hours ago, LordGood said:

I think the easy bot is crippled to a 75% gather rate.

There are the following numbers in the InitGame.js now:

// Sandbox, Very Easy, Easy, Medium, Hard, Very Hard
let rate = [ 0.50, 0.64, 0.80, 1.00, 1.25, 1.56 ];

which means 80% for the easy difficutly (unless there are also some other multipliers or something).

4 hours ago, WhiteTreePaladin said:

The AI tends to train smaller batch sizes (groups of 3, etc.) that the player cannot generally train.

It's possible to configure the batch size in the game options starting from Alpha 21.

[WhiteTreePaladin]

5 hours ago, fcxSanya said:

It's possible to configure the batch size in the game options starting from Alpha 21.

Right, but you can only have a single batch size and it's not that convenient to edit. I think the computer player has more freedom with batches.