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Saturday, June 04, 2022
Balance is cheating
So I was playing around with different map types in Old World, and tried the "Disjunction" map script. It produces a map with equally sized continents, one continent per player, and is balanced for multi-player games. Only I was playing it single-player against AI opponents, and ended up completely crushing them in a "double victory", victory by having twice as many points as the best AI opponent. It turns out that "balance" in these 4X games is equivalent to cheating, because the AI isn't good enough to achieve anything without an unbalanced advantage.
Digging a bit deeper with game starts and console commands to reveal the map, it turns out that the AI starts with two or sometimes even three cities already in place, compared to your one settler that still has to found a city. From that the AI can grow quicker, so by the time you meet the other nations, it is usual that they have a lot more cities than you do. The Disjunction map limited that ability to expand rapidly, and we all ended up with a "balanced" number of cities. At which point the AI had already lost, not being able to use cities as well as a player.
Note that this isn't a criticism of Old World. The AI in Civilization cheats just as much. And I don't know if they fixed it by now, but in Humankind there was a funny exploit where you could automate your scouts early on, and they would use the same algorithm as the AI scouts, but those were cheating like hell and always beelined to the next invisible point of interest.
So while cheating AI in single-player strategy games is totally industry standard, it is nevertheless a bit disappointing. One does get the impression that if you could see what development money was spent on, most of it goes into graphics, and very little of it into AI and gameplay improvements in general. There is a huge graphical difference between Civ 1 and Civ 6, but nearly no improvement in AI. These games are "balanced" by the AI cheating and having unfair advantages.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:43 AM Permanent Link
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AI cheats in all 4x strategy games. Frankly I don't see how that could change anytime soon. Creating a good AI is obscenely expensive. Especially one that could play complex games like Civ or Total War.
Devs also can't just program AI to always do what's optimal because then you'll end up with boring games where the AI always builds their cities or armies the same way and a game too difficult for most people. So they fake it by introducing randomness but then letting the AI cheat to ensure they aren't totally gimped versus the player.
Most players probably never notice the AI cheats.
Devs also can't just program AI to always do what's optimal because then you'll end up with boring games where the AI always builds their cities or armies the same way and a game too difficult for most people. So they fake it by introducing randomness but then letting the AI cheat to ensure they aren't totally gimped versus the player.
Most players probably never notice the AI cheats.
Maybe things will change in the future, but I think now the only way to have an AI that cheats minimally is to design the game so that it suits a basic AI. For example, Civ5 went the opposite way and changed from stacks to one unit her hex. The AI cannot handle or this! It immediately went down a level in ability.
I could have sworn that there was some early strategy game that went the opposite direction. They designed it from the ground up to be possible to have a good non-cheating AI. The result was an AI so good it was impossible for the player to beat -- they had to artificially cripple it to make for a fun game. There's probably no sweet spot since you're going for fun not "fairness".
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