[Freeciv] Re: AI cheating

[Tony Stuckey <stuckey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2001 at 02:18:49PM +0100, Karl-Ingo Friese wrote:
> However, the AI _does_ cheat in a lot of ways. It's triremes
> can move over the water,

        How is this cheating?  AI Triremes can get lost at sea in the same
way that Human player Triremes can.  Triremes have a 50% chance per turn of
being lost at sea.  This is supposed to be modified by advances, but
doesn't appear to be in the code in server:unittools.c.
(player_restore_units()).

> it can look into your cities and
> see how well they are defended

        That would be cheating, yes.
        Note that this is frequently possible to deduce anyway.  The
Embassy screen in Civ1 and Civ2 gives an explicit count of military units
in the entire empire.  If you know that your opponent has 5 cities, 8
units, and all cities show a defender, there's a limit to his concentration
of force.

>and its units dont cost support
> (I bribed away cities which supported sometimes 15 phalanxes
> etc.).

        The AI pays the same unit support costs that humans do.
Unhappiness, Food, Production, etc.
        Bribing cities can cause formerly supported units to be transferred
to a new home city, but they should not be "unsupported" either before or
after the transaction.  Freeciv actually makes it very, very hard to get
truly unsupported units.  This was easy in Civ1, not so easy in Civ2.  It
was in fact the cornerstone of at least one Civ1 strategy.
        If you are implying that the prescence of 15 Phalanx in a city is
evidence that the AI does not pay support costs, you are wrong.  You just
did the AI a big favor by removing a significant support burden from it.
-- 
Anthony J. Stuckey                              stuckey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"And they said work hard, and die suddenly, because it's fun."
        -Robyn Hitchcock.