Is there a game where the AI 'DOESN'T' cheat?

I'm not the one to complain about the AI advantage in certain titles, but to me some of it has been obvious:

Take Madden NFL for example.
Even on 'Normal' levels of competition, the opposite computer controlled team seems to have its 'superpowers'
RTS Games: You know, Earth 2140-2160, Age of Empires, Rome: Total War, etc. Where doesn't the AI cheat in this? On a lot of the things in scenarios I make, the AI and the human players start out as equal, but come along... the opponent suddenly has an army 3 times the size as mine, on 'Normal' levels.

Now I know I like a challenge when I see one, but how is it a challenge when something is borked like this? I don't like having the 'full advantage' either. I'd like something in between, but apparently, I hadn't seen anything in regards to this.

Why is this? Its been baffling my mind for years.

I think one of the worst was 7th Saga--for anyone who remembers that. I don't recall the exact mechanics, but some of the enemy baddies could pull the cheapest shots at you. There were times when I was convinced my bro (I was watching him play) was going to easily win a battle, when the foe suddenly took off a ludicrous amount of hit points. It's like just when you think you've got 'em, they pull a one-up on ya!

The final battle of FF9 is kind of like that. Just when you think you have it whipped the bad guy pulls out the poison and one of you is doomed to die. I hate those NPC cheaters!

Sometimes it's done rather well, e.g. Kefka in FFVI using Fallen One on your party. It's like "WHOA, LOOK AT HIS POWER!" more than "what a cheap ass trick out"

Rome: TW doesn't actually cheat on normal levels. Anything past that, however, and they get economy bonuses on the strategy map and morale and HP boosts on the battlefield.

GalCiv2 made a big deal out of non-cheating AI; if you play the Intelligent setting (somewhere in the middle), the AI has the exact same advantages as the player does. On lesser settings they get actual handicaps (only 75% economy output, for instance), and on harder they get bonuses (150% research or whatever).

I think Civ4 is the same, but I'm not entirely sure on that, I get whomped on the easy settings.

They like to make their cheating look like something cool when it is nothing but a cheap trick. In my case Vivi always died in FF9 so I think that is why he retired from that game and became Pathfinder Linden.

Torley, you nailed that on the head. Especially when you would come up against the other main characters that you had turned down/not teamed up with. You wouldn't stand a chance against them unless you went and crawled around killing baddies untill you could do it with one or two attacks and by that time it was just boring. i guess it isn't so much cheating as just bad balance. might be the case in most games?

It's hard to say what cheating really is. If the computer opponent is supposed to be of a high skill level then that means, yes, the computer will probably tell itself anything it can to win. You can see that as cheating or you can see it as "False Intuition". Good players have it. Bad players don't. and pixels just can't. so they cheat. </ramble>

I remember when I first played Starcraft against the AI and they were impossibly efficient at generating first-strike drone armies. It's basically the same as if you could play against a person who has multiple point command technology (like that funky touch screen someone posted a while back) while you only have a mouse. The flexibility itself is like cheating even if the rules themselves are not broken.

And that's why Skynet will win.

I played through the original Driver game on PC, swearing at the cops who, even if you pulled over and would assume they would come and arrest you, would barrel into your car at top speeds in attempt to ... I dunno ... barrel into your car at top speeds?

In any event, I managed to beat all but the last level, where you have to drive the Presidential car through manhattan. I must have played this level 30 times in a row straight, kept dying.

Like, #1, what frigging criminals plan to kidnap a President by "smashing into his car", rather than say, with guns or whatnot?

#2, I have seen enough History Channel shows on the Presidential limos and towncars to know that this was cheap. My car reacted like a normal car, got tossed around like nothing. The real car weighs on the order of about 10,000 pounds, can take an RPG without failing, and basic laws of newtonian physics tell us that no wimpy sub-ton car is going to really shake around a 5-6 ton bulletproof mauler.

Unfortunately for the AI, they lacked a critical ability that I had: Editing the level files.
Believe it or not, the original driver had the levels saved as plain text files. At the top of each level was a listing of your car and its stats.

Let's see... adjust the weight of the car ... adjust the hitpoints... there we go. 10x as strong.

Here's the real bitch of it - even with 10x the mass and hitpoints, I still only managed to beat the level with 50% of health.

...

I just played through F.E.A.R. recently. Graphics are great, I thought the story was pretty good, but the game was short and lacked level variety.

Anyway, the A.I. on that was really done well. Enemies cooperated as a team, took cover when you were spotted, dynamically changed tactics to flank and set traps, would peak around corners to see you rather than jumping out, see incoming grenades and move to avoid, spot your flashlight light, etc ...

... and were balanced quite nicely by losing mobility when injured. I could shoot them in the leg and they'd limp, hit them with a few shots and they'd fall and struggle to get up, and oh yeah, the slow-motion mode of the game definitely gave the player the edge.

Hi, I teach on a Games Development and AI degree in Newport, UK. So, without meaning to sound blunt or pedantic, I have to say that 99.99999% of AI in games is just marketing hype. They aren't intelligent at all. They are algorithms, usually tweeked to give an impression of skill. And yet, the PR people know that the term "AI" (mostly inappropriately used) is a selling feature of the game; I recall reviews extoling the virtues of AI in Half-Life where the soldiers ducked and ran round behind you, etc.

It's relative I suppose. Gamers use the term differently, which is fine, I guess. But the term "cheat" is also interesting. My take on this would be that the 'AI' (AU? Artificial Unintelligent?) cheats when it uses knowledge that you as a player would not have (seeing through walls) or having different physics (they can dodge bullets!) or economics with the game resources. Some cheats are necessary, due to the game mechanics: without inverse raytracing to determine what an NPC would be able to see, it is computationally impossible (in terms of getting a game to have reasonable frame rate) for the Combine soldier not to 'cheat' in order to tell whether it could really see you as you are crawling along. We can forgive that for the game play.

Where I hate bad game design is the NU (Natural Unintelligence), where game designers underestimate the intelligence of players. One example from FPS (first person shooter) games is where the monster is just scripted to stand round the corner until you come into view, then run at you. This is lazy programming, not poor AI, because good game design would give a purpose to the creature being there. This also applies to RTS (real time stragety) games and RPG (role playing game) titles. I think that this is why MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) games are a good development as you get to play with other people, who should be much more intelligent than bots. Well, that's the theory!

Mike

Yeah, I've noticed this too with Civ4. I'm a veteran from the original Civ, so, I'm kinda thinking to myself, what gives?

Anyway, I suppose the proper balance of things is needed to consider when programming the AI. I think this is primarily why MMORPGs came of age, is because the players themselves can cooperate amongst each other. Against impossilbe odds might I add.

When I start trying out new strategies, I know 'how' the game 'should' work. But it just seems like I'm stunned time and time again, and have to re-think. I dunno.

I've often found that games where the AI doesn't cheat are even harder and more frustrating than normal games, so be careful what you wish for - you just might get it.

I totally remember that one, Torley. Yeah, that was one of the worst - incredible levels of "special" privileges for the AI.
This is why I like more open-ended strategy/simulation games, like The Sims and Black & White.

Apparently certain button mash fighter series of games realized that the single player experience was insufficient because of the way the AI simply scaled up how much damage it could do and life it had. The solution was to study player capability at championships and model the AI after tactics and strategies used by real people to win tournaments. The result was a much more intersting computer opponent.

A simple analogy might be the chess program that stores thousands of strategies, moves, and solutions versus a chess program that simply has two rows of queens on the highest difficulty.

What annoyed me about FarCry was that they'd set it up so that there'd be at least one asshole with a rocketlauncher (and apparently a truck full of rockets) in a really hard to reach spot who would pin you down while his buddies crept up on you.

Snipe? Maybe... if you can get a shot in between the fucking ROCKETS HITTING YOU!

So I cheated. I have switches to disable AI perception and hearing.

I think if there' an AI that doesn't cheat, but can beat you just by pure skill and strategizing, would be truely horrific. I think the engineers make em cheat just a little bit, 'cuz they're so freaking stupid, and thank god they are. We don't need no thinking machines, we don't need no thought control...

~elg

Back in the day, I was a huge Starcraft fanatic. I liked it so much in fact, that I'd go so far as to say that game cost me at least $50,000 before I had to swear it off. I'll tell my quick story since I know everyone problably wants to know how Starcraft could cost a person 50K, and then I'll get back on topic; I promse.

Several years ago, while I was still running my sales & marketing business, I installed Starcraft on all the computers in my office so that my assistant and I could play after hours. Well, it didn't take long before we started playing during work. Not long after that, certain members of the sales force got involved inbetween their sales calls. Well, you can do the math on what happened next. People who previously had been star sales reps were letting their appointments with customers slide so they could engage in these massive officewide Starcraft tournaments. Eventually I had no choice but to pull the plug. When I ran the numbers to estimate what would have happened statistically had all the sales reps been seeing customers during the times they had been playing the game, the figures were painful. The estimates showed several hundred thousand dollars in potential sales had been lost. Ouch!

Okay, back on topic. Every play Starcraft against the computer? I used to swear up and down the thing cheats. It's like Einsman said about other RTS games. Suddenly the opponent has 3 times the army you have and there's no explanation as to why. Evidence suggests the computer's units take less time to build than yours do, and the game seems rigged.

Place a cloaked observer unit in the enemy base though, and you discover the real truth. You can watch things being built, and they take the right amount of time. The difference is in the time it takes the computer to make decisions about what to build, and in the speed at which it can issue commands. I'll explain.

First, every time a human player is faced with a decision about what unit to build next, he or she has to pause for a half a second or so (or more) and actively decide. The computer on the other hand can make the same decision in a nanosecond. To the a human, every action is a strategic judgment call, but to the computer, it's just a simple calculation of probability. Add up all those half secods vs. nanoseconds, and within minutes the computer is light years ahead.

Second, every time a human player tells a factory what to build or a unit what to do, he or she has to click the mouse or press a button to make it happen. The process requires thought, then physical action, then computer processing. For the computer player though, none of those mouse clicks and button presses have to happen. In the nanosecond immediately following the one in which the computer made its decision about what to do, it can issue the command to have the decision carried out. In the time it takes for a single click of the mouse by a human hand, the computer player can issue dozens of commands.

Put these two factors together, and there's just no possible way a human player can build an RTS army as fast as a computer player. The human can still win though because the human is smarter and more creative than the computer, so the playing field IS level, even though it might not look that way. It's kind of like how Apollo described what it's like to fight cylons in the original Batllestar Galactica (yes, I think in TV quotes; I'm a geek). He said something to the effect of "They're bigger and stronger than us and they can think a lot faster than we can, but we can be more unpredictable. We can always do things they don't expect. It's the only advantage we have."

Also, the designers of the games do want you to win. If a game is too hard, no one will want to play it. They have to make the AI stupid enough that you can outsmart it.


Now, as for a game that I know DOES cheat, it's backgammon on my cell phone. I lose about 4 out of every 5 games, and it's not because I'm a bad player. If I ever find the sick twisted bastard who designed the algorhithm that controls the dice, well, let's just say, "'I'ma call a coupla hard, pipe-hittin' [explative deleted]s, who'll go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch. You hear me talkin', hillbilly boy? I ain't through with you by a damn sight. I'ma get medieval on your ass."

You see, the computer player has this uncanny nack for rolling the dice just right. It turns up doubles at an unbelievable frequency, not enough that you can definitively cry "cheater", but certainly way more than the statistical average. Whenever the human player has a piece exposed, the computer just so happens to turn up the exact roll required to bump that piece, unless there's a more advantageous option than bumping available, in which case a perfect roll for that option just happens to turn up. My own rolls, on the other hand, seem to be totally and completely random, sometimes bad, sometimes good, sometimes great, but almost never perfect, and hardly ever doubles.

After getting tired of losing so frequently, I decided to try an experiement. I started the game as normal, human vs. computer and then I essentially let the computer play against itself by asking for hint on each of my turns. I lost every time. The hints were perfectly logical, usually the moves I would have made myself, but the favoritism in the dice rolling continued to weigh heavily on the computer's side.

Then I set to both players as computer, and I sat back and watched. The win/loss rate for both sides was 50/50. Those amazingly lucky turns of the dice now applied to both sides equally, and the result was each side won or lost by the skin of its teeth every single time. In most cases, the losing side had only one or two pieces left on the board at the end.

So, my experience is RTS games may appear to cheat, but that doesn't really mean they do. My cell phone on the other hand is rat bastard who's gonna get shoved down the throat of a certain "Mr. soon to be living the rest of his short life in aginizing pain" dice programmer.

I'm glad you guys dont play Counter Strike. Or mabye you do? I swear it seems like every other kill I score I get to see one of these:

"OMG u HaXx0r WTF!!!!1!11!!"

Its not really the AI that cheats in CS...its the players, which is worse IMO.

Chess

As the rule set becomes more complicated it becomes more difficult to predict behavior. Part of the problem is that humans can play the game over and over and find weaknesses in the AI and exploit them. Because the AI algorithms are fixed it becomes a matter of learning the behaviors of the AI. As most military stategists know, predictability is a sure road to a downfall.

There's a 4X game out right now called Galactic Civilizations II. The AI doesn't "cheat" in traditional senses of the word... if you set the AI higher, it handles its math differently, but otherwise it plays every game straight up like any player would! (What's perceived as cheating turns out to be extreme micromanagement- a computer never gets tired, so it literally rebalances *every* detail no matter how small each turn, whereas most players slack off on the details over time.)

(By the way, it's a space empire-building game, and each AI you play against uses its own AI for that "race".)

Great game- harkens back to the old days where graphics don't matter and all that does is gameplay. Galciv2.com for info. (No, I'm no associated with the game hehe.)

It's just because the AI sucks. Depending on the complexity of the game the AI suckage is greater or lesser... Cheating is just to close the gap between the stupid AI and the player. I think it's that simple, isn't it?

By the way, for a game with a non-cheating AI, try chess against a computer.

I used to play Tribes and Unreal Tournament with this guy (who also played CS) and no matter what game he played, he was insanely good. He would just jump in the middle of any room and headshot every single person. He didn't use scripts or anything (I know because I'd go watch him play in his room sometimes). I remember there being a time when we were pretty even in Tribes and then we didn't play each other for about a month and suddenly he was amazing.

Wow, you know FPS Doug?
(Reference: Pure Pwnage