The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
Please vote in the Forum Structure Poll. Polling will close at 2PM EST on January 21, 2025.
Games and Cheating NPC's
Ziac45
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
First real thread figure this would be a decent topic. I will rarely go up to the highest difficult in any games campaign, but occasionally if I really enjoyed the game I will. This was how it was with Gears, and now Call of Duty 4. Gears of War I thought did a great job of scaling the Enemies up to a higher difficulty. They were hard, but it never felt like they were just being over the top and cheating. Emergance holes ran out of locusts eventually and all was well.
Now Call of Duty 4 which I have been playing has just been pissing me off. I love the game, campaign was amazing (which is why I am doing it on Veteran). But two of my favorite missions before have just been frustrating. One where you have to rescue some guys that are surrounded. I Started got to the guys, and there were two machine gun turrets in the window. I shoot them see the helicopter drop more off. And I waited in my position... They didn't move, once I jumped out of that position they attacked. Okay minor annoyance but it's nothing game breaking. Well I shot no less than 20 guys in those two machine gun windows and they just kept respawning.
Infinite respawning enemies just seems like a horrible way to scale up the difficulty in games. If they want to make it harder make them use better tactics, not be able to shoot me a mile away from the hip with an Ak 47 while my sniper I have to lead to hit with.
Shortened, Talk about how games should scale up the enemies and games that do it well/games that do it poorly.
Now Call of Duty 4 which I have been playing has just been pissing me off. I love the game, campaign was amazing (which is why I am doing it on Veteran). But two of my favorite missions before have just been frustrating. One where you have to rescue some guys that are surrounded. I Started got to the guys, and there were two machine gun turrets in the window. I shoot them see the helicopter drop more off. And I waited in my position... They didn't move, once I jumped out of that position they attacked. Okay minor annoyance but it's nothing game breaking. Well I shot no less than 20 guys in those two machine gun windows and they just kept respawning.
Infinite respawning enemies just seems like a horrible way to scale up the difficulty in games. If they want to make it harder make them use better tactics, not be able to shoot me a mile away from the hip with an Ak 47 while my sniper I have to lead to hit with.
Shortened, Talk about how games should scale up the enemies and games that do it well/games that do it poorly.
Ziac45 on
0
Posts
Drop a briefcase full of cash on the desk of the people that work on AI for Galactic Civilizations and ask them for help.
Seriously, those guys write AI of Shodan or Icarus like deviousness.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
So fucking true.
Two karts whip by my like I'm parked, and there were no special effects around them to denote an item use. So two karts driving normally just pass someone with a super boost like nothing. Right.
Also F-Zero. No matter how hard I tried, there's simply no way to get ahead of the opposition to give yourself a safe lead.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
To the extent that even if you're playing on the easier settings, the AI will sometimes point out to you what you're doing and scheming, and how hard it would pummel you if the difficulty setting would allow it to act to its full capacity.
EDIT: Anyway, to add another game in, I liked the way Crysis scaled the AI. Not so much making them dumber (although there is a bit of that), but on the easier difficulty levels they give you bigger advantages in your hud and indicators, and switch the enemies from speaking Korean to speaking English so that you can understand what they're saying to each other in combat. I thought that last one was a really nice touch.
I noticed this in Mario Kart 64 as well, but it only seemed to happen with one character. Whenever I did the Grand Prix, I always noticed that one character (never specific) had a massive edge over all the others (far, far ahead 99% of the time, often has a ridiculous lead). Sometimes it makes the Grand Prix more edgy and fun because you actually have a challenge, but usually it's just an excuse for me to start abusing my controller.
As for regular tales of cheating AI's? Pokemon Stadium/Colosseum. End of story.
They don't cheat. It's not in the programming.
If you make vertical matches as much as they do, you'll be equally as lucky.
Nooooo... it knows what lies above the playing field and will use that to get extra turns.
Yup, especially Stadium 2. Challenge Cup was such a bitch. At least you could somewhat even it out in the Little Cup with a Thick Club carrying Cubone. But that requires you having a Thick Club in the first place.
Also have to mention NFL Blitz. How does every pass you throw in the 2nd half get perfectly deflected to an opposing player for an interception?
I WILL NOT BE DOING 3DS FOR NWC THREAD. SOMEONE ELSE WILL HAVE TO TAKE OVER.
Spoiler contains Friend Codes. Won't you be my friend?
More Friend Codes!
Mario Kart Wii: 3136-6982-0286 Tetris Party: 2364 1569 4310
Guitar Hero: Metallica: 1032 7229 7191
TATSUNOKO VS CAPCOM: 1935-2070-9123
Nintendo DS:
Worms: Open Warfare 2: 1418-7870-1606 Space Bust-a-Move: 017398 403043
Scribblenauts: 1290-7509-5558
The mission was quite stealthly and set at night - basically you have to destroy the tanks and escape.
Anyway, I crawl up unseen to one of the tanks and lay satchel charges beneath it before trekking all of the way to the other side of the camp, on top of a hill in a bush. It was my plan to (hopefully) distract the AI.
Well, I set off the charges and the tank went bang quite nicely, this was quickly followed by every enemy soldier turning round and with pinpoint accuracy shooting on my posistion. To cut a long story short - I died - because of bad AI.
Well, that is how not to do AI in games.
F-Zero GX is the worst cheater in the entire universe though. Story Mode Chapter 7 is proof of this. There is no possible way Black Bull can ever be that good normally.
Amen.
The game director is a huge fat liar. The computer knows which moves produce which results because the puzzles for some fucking retarded reason are not randomized.
Whenever I start a battle it always has the same gem layout and specific moves will always result in the same drops of new pieces.
That sounds incredibly awesome. Is that in all the GalCiv games?
It's not -that- bad since the AI is also as stupid as possum fuck.
"Hmmm... if I match the skulls, I win... buuuuuut, there is that nice wildcard that'd give me 15 red mana."
GalCiv does scale in a pretty awesome manner... I'm hoping they do more work on the space civ kinds of games.
I am a freaking nerd.
On the other hand, I did watch a friend play through and three times in a row the AI got dealt the 10-damage card, use that card on a creature, then roll the exact number to land on that creature.
Yeah that is some huge fat lying.
If I could remind you for a moment that when I play, the board always starts the same. In fact, it's the same layout as this other dude's. And the pieces that fall are entirely determined by what you match up on the board. Now I'm no programmer or statistician, but I'm pretty sure the odds of that happening infinitely, for multiple people, from random generators is pretty fucking slim.
So this "lazy" programmer programmed individual paths for assembled puzzle layouts, accommodating every possible move one could make at the beginning, and all subsequent moves from that point (which would exponentially increase the paths or something)? That's not lazy. That is stupid, and would produce a cheating computer who can memorize the patterns more easily than the player.
I agree, boards start the same, but that doesn't mean they remain the same. Gems change ALL the time.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
It would fuck up a human cheating maybe; someone trying to jot down what does what. But what I'm saying is the way it plays, everything is predetermined.
If I match up the skulls on the left side, the same pieces will always fall down. If I do the red, the same pieces over there will always fall down. If I did the red first then the skulls, different pieces would show up, but, they would remain the same any time you performed the matches in that sequence.
That means the pieces that fall are just waiting up there to see what you do, and then they know what they have to be. So for all I know a spell that changes the colours of a certain gem tells the dropping pieces that they have to be something different in accordance with what occurred on the board. But if you played that spell again in the same way a different game, the results would probably be identical.
You know what? My posts are just getting more and more poorly worded, so this might be the point where I lose you to confusion.
Do people ever proclaim the game cheats when you make a simple, obvious 4-of-a-kind that turns into a 10x Cascade?? The AI has the same luck as you do, its all about minimising their chances of getting ridiclious combos.
If you see a chance for a vertical 3-of-a-kind which splices a horizontal 3-of-a-kind near the top of the grid, you probably shouldn't go the vertical one it because the chances of a colour matching the horizontal 3-of-a-kind appearing just above it or just below it (thus giving the AI a 4-of-a-kind opportunity) can be as high as 50% (depending how high it is on the grid).
If what I've said is as clear as mud, you haven't been playing enough Puzzle Quest heh
As for cheating AI? Rubberbanding in Mario Kart 64 and Burnout 3 would have given me multiple heartfailures if I were older.
I'm also a big non-fan of bullet sponge AI. The hardest difficulty on Uncharted springs to mind.
Not to mention the insanity that results when you start using spells and items in proper combination. Dealing about 200 damage in one turn with a wizard became the norm after a while.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
'You discovered the wheel'
'Shaka has built the Manhattan Project'
Fuck you Shaka. Fuck you.
Hahahaha, just embarrassed myself again by laughing out loud at work
It was worse in Original Civ or Civ3. You would always be like 10 hours into a game and send your spearmen to the Zulu border and 3 APCs and a legion of tanks would be revealed.
Fuck.
The bonuses the AI civs get as you ramp up the difficulty are pretty well documented. Stuff like getting a free defender unit when it makes a new city and extra production units.
It definitely has an edge in general in understanding diplomacy and what you can ask of other civs better than the average player though. Knowing exactly when you can ask for a free tech as a gift and having buddies you can easily trade tech with is a useful advantage. I swear that I adopt a warmonger approach simply due to an inability to make allies out of the other Civs, only managing somewhat warm relations at best.
Now Civ3? That was full of dirty tricks. One of the nice things in Civ4 is how tech trades cannot be done until a civ has writing researched. So until then, stuff you discover stays yours, letting you build up a nice start. In Civ3, there was no such restriction. One quickly learned that the AI would trade tech like crazy. If you gave a tech to the AI, rest assured that by the next turn, every civ capable of learning it would have it as well. Making sure you never gave an AI a tech on their turn so that you yourself would instead reap the benefits of selling the tech to all the AI players proved crucial for some players. Then they patched in the ability for the AI to do something like conduct trade even when it wasn't their turn
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
For example, wandering monsters. If they have a single positive morale score, they will not get their morale 1 in 20 times (which the 5% chance should give them). They will get it 2 out of 3 times. This is particularly common when you are have armies that are reasonably but not ungodly more powerful than the wandering monsters, when your armies are slightly weaker but your hero is powerful, or when you are facing ranged units.
Strangely, this almost never happens when facing the enemy players, even computerized ones, just the monsters on the map.
God, I love every Civ game ever made but that right there is the reason why I have never been able to play any of them on higher than the normal difficulty. The bonuses they get would be easy enough to overcome if I weren't constantly at war with the rest of the world combined. In Civ4, religion makes people not hate you from the get go, but goddamnit if every computer player isn't a goddamn backstabber. It'll be +8 happy with some dude, and we will both declare war and combine forces against a civ of different religion and 2 turns later they will switch sides and tell me to stop attacking their "trusted ally". Bullshit. Of course, the Total War games are worse in that regard.
It's not cheating so much as just a poor mechanic, but I can't even count how many games have been ruined by me destroying some civ, and then when they're down to 3-4 cities, they vassilate to an ally, who goes from +20 with me to -6 because they're forced to declare war. Then both our economies get wrecked and some other continent's civs rise to power.