Civ II's AI is a piece of crap cheating hunk of living sh*t!!!! I'm so PO'd right now at it I can't see straight! Damn f*cking thing ruined an entire damn game! Person shouldn't have to save every damn turn to prevent f*cking AI cheating!

Hope those damn programmers learn how to tweak their coding in the next go-around.

Piece of crap AI.

CYBERAmazon

CA, don't let it get to ya. Go into RULES.txt, give your units impossibly high attacks and moves, and let loose.

quote: Originally posted by CYBERAmazon on 05-12-2000 10:34 PM Everyone: Civ II's AI is a piece of crap cheating hunk of living sh*t!!!! I'm so PO'd right now at it I can't see straight! Damn f*cking thing ruined an entire damn game! Person shouldn't have to save every damn turn to prevent f*cking AI cheating!

Dude...chill the f#ck OUT! You must be playing on Deity...don't look at it as cheating. Look at it as advanced handicapping...sure, they roll out 15 cruise missiles against my Navy the second they discover rocketry. Sure, they can build Mechanized Infantry in a size 4 city every turn. Sure, they move all of their units into positions around your cities then suprise attack, with no consequences. It's humiliating, I know, but God damn it, take it like a man!!

quote: Hope those damn programmers learn how to tweak their coding in the next go-around.

That's the one piece of criticism that's not really been addressed with all of the Civ2-X releases. The AI - still sucks.

**insane laughter** The AI has done all of those things to me in the past — but not this time. This time, I paid the price for being a perfectionist and attempting to *help* a the Sioux Empire.

Basically, the Sioux had located "B" city only two squares away from "A" city. The radi were horribly interlocking — right up to each city's city limits. Since "B" city was only size 2, I destroyed the Sioux unit there (via "cheat" menu), put in a barbarian unit, then used one of my units to destroy the "barbarian" city. At that point, I went back and created a veteran engineer for the Sioux and located it it PROPERLY so the new city would be more realistic, in terms of gameplay.

Somehow, the Sioux took that as an attack on them. After calling my empire a minor province of their empire, they let loose. Not so much damage, but I was so PO'd at that point I lost it. Killed every civilization via "cheat" and ended up with a pyrhhic "Nazca the Just" rating.

Whatever. Talk about irony.

Anyway, I've done this many times before and this was the *first* time the AI had ever taken it as an attack by my empire on it. It just threw me into a tizzy — as indicated in my original post .

Probably just dumb of me to even aid the AI, but I'm looking for REALISM in my scenario/games.

CYBERAmazon

**LOL** It's sorely tempting to do just that sometimes. Can't though ... if I want that type of game, I simply play at the Chieftain level. Fairly good stress reliever at that level of play.

BTW, I've created a pair of customized units (airship and elite corps) that allow one to kick butt in the ancient and modern eras, respectively. AI gets to use them, too, though .

CYBERAmazon

Take it like a man? Bwa-hahahaha! **cough** Ahem. Actually, I do most of the time. Other times the AI has really PO'd me, I've simply created 100 nuclear missiles and taken out every AI city on Earth.

This go-around just annoyed the hell out of me for some reason. Probably because I wasn't expecting it (see my reply to Mao). Basically, I ended up losing because now I have to re-start a new game.

**sigh** Nukes are definitely more joyous at ending the AI's aspirations. The "kill civilization" option in the "cheat" menu sometimes is, um, too sanitized .

AI doesn't really improve, huh? Doesn't surprise me. That kind of work would require re-releasing the game after a bunch of work at the source level. I play the Macintosh version of Civ II and Civ II Gold. The latter version has a terrible habit of crashing upon exiting the application. Brian Nesse was never able to figure out a solution to that, short of eradicating the MP part of the game to get at the problem.

CYBERAmazon

It was only just recently that I discovered that it will even create units out of thin air! One went to war with my, attacking an outlying city. It took most of my accumulated and delivered defensive units to save it from Tanks, and an arriving Fighter squadron discovered a column of the damn things coming at me. On investigating further, I found an ENDLESS column of them.

After a while, in frustration, I opened a saved file in cheat mode. The AI was building Tanks in 3 cities, each one taking 4 turns. So, that was less than 1 Tank per turn. Yet I was destroying 2 or 3 each turn and the column never got smaller!

What's the point of playing a game like that?

Who knows with the AI. Personally, I haven't encountered the "unlimited army" you described — then again, I play the Macintosh version, so maybe it got fixed. Referring back to my first sentence, I think it's impossible to predict the AI production pattern once it's declared war on you.

I've seen AI cities (over a dozen more than once) sitting in "Capitalization" mode, almost like the AI's waiting for something to happen. Usually a war with you or another AI. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if the AI then switched the "Capitalization" cities back into production. In my case, that meant 12 divisions of armor bearing down on me that hadn't been there the previous turn.

Ouch.

CYBERAmazon

------------------
Oldman,

"There are not more than 5 musical notes..." - Sun Tzu
"There are not more than 5 primary colours..." - Sun Tzu
"There are not more than 5 cardinal tatses..." - Sun Tzu

There are many ways they could make the game tougher at higher settings. Heck, just giving the AI access to more sophisticated combat programs at higher levels would do wonders for the game. Watching the computer spit out a unit every turn to attack a position it can't take for 1,000 years is enough to make me laugh...

And if you use the cheat mode for ANYTHING you aren't allowed to complain, let alone throw a hissyfit.

*adopts a holier than thou posture* I have never used the cheat mode for anything, ever. I know I should run a few research tests, but I don't want to have anything to do with the thing. Once you use it, you can always justify it.

New blood in the On Topic forums is always appreciated, as long as they come here to post On Topic.

quote: Originally posted by geofelt on 05-15-2000 01:36 PM To make the game a challenge at higher levels, the programmers increase the level of cheating. It would be most difficult to do it with fairness. As to production, units, improvements, and wonders are not built city, by city as the human players do, instead, the AI gets the whole shield and gold production to allocate as it sees fit. This is simpler programming, and it also helps tocreate a challenge to the good human player.

***

Geofelt:

That goes quite a distance toward explaining why the AI can build 600-shield wonders in two or three turns without spending money or using caravans/freights/disbanding units to get what it needs.

If an AI civ has collective shield output of 1000, and it can allocate at will, that certainly does make for a challenge, as does the reduced shield box at higher stages.

CYBERAmazon

***

Everyone:

Thanks for the contributions to this thread. As for myself, I never used the "cheat" menu until seeing — and being unable to explain — AI behavior that just didn't jive, so to speak. The only time I use it now is when my city has three or four veteran spies housed in it and the AI STILL gets your most advanced technology. Sorry, but mobile warfare simply doesn't fit in an Iron Age society.

Never have played multi-player, either. My dial-up Web connection probably isn't steady enough (read: 100 percent of the time) to allow for safe multi-playing. Saving up for a ADSL or cable connection .

CYBERAmazon

It used to happen a lot to me ... that is, until I started slaughtering the bastards whenever they got near territory in wartime.

CYBERAmazon