AI Cheats! It instantly knows where the ressources are

Did the A.I ignore uninhabitable systems? Are you sure it just wasn't saturating the map with colonizers?

When I play I send colony ships to every star within range just in case there is a habitable planet there....perhaps the A.I does the same thing.

I woudl say set planets and habitable to very rare. I mean it's a joke to assume it's not blind luck if he is sending ships out to every system on abundant/abundant and when they get there he just picks the best planet.

That was exactly what I told and asked the reviewer. I did not believe it and I admit I did not want it to be true.

And I tested it with:
Stars: abundant
Planets: common
Habitable Planets: medium
Galaxy Size: large

While the AI in fact did send scout ships to EVERY system, the colony ships ignored the ones without habitable planets. I even saw the Thalan sending 3 colony ships in a row (each bought one round after the other) straight to a distant system where no scout has been so far. And what they found were exactly three habitable planets. On their way there they passed 2 systems closer to their home but ignored them.

As I said. Just go and test it yourself. I'm very dissapointed because the AI's scouting looked so real and I really wanted to believe that the AI plays fair and has so impressive startings because of an extremly effective scouting algorithm.

somebody should fix that it is a unfair advantage to say the least

I've tested this as well and I've never saw a colony ship go anywhere the scouts or survey ship had not been by.

yeah, someone made this accusation a while ago. After that, I did go back and started a game on a huge galaxy with rare abundant planets, and set the cheat code so I could see the entire galaxy, then just kept hitting the turn button.
Personally, I didn't see it do anything suspicious. A couple of the civs just spammed colony ships and sent them everywhere, and the others produced a bunch of scouts, then only built colony ships when a scout had gotten close to a habitable planet.

not that this is extensive testing, by any means... i only tried it a couple times before I got bored and went back to playing, and I have no interest in digging through the AI script.
but like I said, I didn't notice anything that screamed 'cheating'

This was discussed ad nauseum the week of release, and addressed by the devs. You could use the search button on the left to dig up the old posts if you are really concerned about it. Keep in mind alot of people are playing a beta version right now, so some people might be playing different versions of the game than others, and at different difficulty levels.

I have noticed compelling counterexamples. Half a dozen times I've seen an AI pass up a double digit PQ planet in order to settle a PQ 6 or so that is closer to its homeworld. It's settling the first habitable thing it finds in-system. If it were cheating, why in the seven hells would it choose a PQ 6 over a PQ 26?

also, I just noticed you said you were using the cheat to create Battleships and using them to scout... but, if you're really concerned about this, it would make more sense to use the cheat that just reveals the entire map.
I can't remember for sure what it is... ctrl+W I think?

We have gone through this over and over again.

You can watch for yourself.

Load the game with the cheat flag.  Then hit Ctrl-U to unhide the map.  The AI does not send colony ships to planets that it has not first scouted out.  The AI doesn't know about planets until they've been explored.

This is not difficult to verify.  The AI does NOT cheat.

I also have seen the AI pick the poor planet in a system. If it knew all the planets it would have taken a different one but it took the first one it saw.

Remember good tatics may not be what you think.

But somehow it knows of ressources and habitable planets far outside its senor reach.

Here is another test to find out what the ai knows without scouting:

Unhide the map, 2x turn.
Then surround every scout and flagship with summoned battleships (Ctrl-B) In most cases the AI will build 2 Scouts. If all 3 ships of a race are blocked, just watch. In some cases it seemed to influence the ai resulting in fighters being built instead of colony ships. But i had a cases where the Yor send constructor straight to a military ressource their nearest scout ship was 14 parsecs away from. HOW could they know it was there? Good guessing on planets may happen. But ressources? Common. No one can predict where they are. But the AI definitly knew it.

The idea that no scout ship == cheating AI doesn't prove squat to me. I think it has to be tested to a much greater extent than that to prove whether it is cheating or not.

How many times does the AI send the correct number of colony ships blind? What's the success ratio? Do all races do this, or just different starting techs/racial abilities?

The idea that no scout ship == cheating AI doesn't prove squat to me. I think it has to be tested to a much greater extent than that to prove whether it is cheating or not.

How many times does the AI send the correct number of colony ships blind? What's the success ratio? Do all races do this, or just different starting techs/racial abilities?

I've never tested specifically for this, but at lower levels I have "stolen" very high quality planets out from under the AI's nose. Short of the AI making a "purposeful mistake", there is no way to reconcile this with the supposition that the AI is cheating.

Why would the AI use its initial colony ship to colonize a class 4 planet in its own system when a class 17 is just 1 sector away?

Actually, I noticed this in the one game I played on simple level that I was using to test my ability to post to the Metaverse. I got out into the galaxy so quickly (tiny, 4 opponents, most settings at occasional) that I basically saw the AI make all of its moves without officially using cheat codes.

(I'm just saying this to account for my rather interesting set of medals in my sig...)

Daigaled, don't use the battleship cheat but the reveal entire map. Maybe you'll come up with other conclusion.

But somehow it knows of ressources and habitable planets far outside its senor reach. Here is another test to find out what the ai knows without scouting: Unhide the map, 2x turn. Then surround every scout and flagship with summoned battleships (Ctrl-B) In most cases the AI will build 2 Scouts. If all 3 ships of a race are blocked, just watch. In some cases it seemed to influence the ai resulting in fighters being built instead of colony ships. But i had a cases where the Yor send constructor straight to a military ressource their nearest scout ship was 14 parsecs away from. HOW could they know it was there? Good guessing on planets may happen. But ressources? Common. No one can predict where they are. But the AI definitly knew it.

The resources are another matter.  It's the same code as GalCiv 1 so I can't really say how they find resources. It's possible the AI knows where the resources are and if that's the case, it's pretty easy to fix. But in the bigger scheme of things, that's fairly trivial. I didn't write that code and it's pretty old. The AI rarely beats me to resources so if it doesn't know where they are, it's not doing a very good job exploiting it.

Your claim was very explicit, however: You said the AI "instantly knows where the best planets are" which is nonsense. They absolutely do not know where the best planets are.  They have to scout them like players do. 

I wrote that code personally and know for a fact that the AI cannot colonize a planet unless it knows about it.

In 1.0X, for instance, just to be double-safe, I added a special flag to planets so that not only do planets have to been in sensor range at some point but they have to be tagged with a bIsKnown boolean that is only set when one of THEIR ships scans it with their sensors.

So you can say that I don't take kindly to people making these "it cheats!!" claims given how much effort was put in to having the AI figure out it needs to build scouts, sending scouts out to find planets, then adjusting its production to deal with known planets.

I do have the AI randomly go out with colony ships into a cluster of planets at higher difficulty levels as a "guess" (just like a human player would) but it's not b-lining to a good planet other than by sheer luck.

I'm going to lock this thread.  There are other threads like this and I've taken the time in the past to walk through.

At the end of the day, it's really about trust.  If you think we're lying about the game not cheating (other than at the highest levels), then well what's really the point?

I have been using the cheat parameter to do some extensive testing and noticed one thing that should be looked into regarding this. I switched races, clicked turn, then switched back and two of my colonizers had orders into uncharted space, straight to planets that I had not discovered. Another A.I had discovered them. Also the A.I starts out in contact with every other race. That is pretty nice as an advantage I would say. Also with the beta I got a message from the pirates that I Was threating thier world with my transports etc. I clicked talk to and sure enough they had no worlds. I really hate this detection sequence as it is easily avoidable when you want to, but hard to avoid setting off when your at war with another race. It should be removed entirely as the strategy is stupid anyways. Also they don't seem to mind colonizers which you can turn into large ships that are heavily armed enough to take out a defender and sack a world if you do a field upgrade (something that comes in handy to zap all of thier good worlds out of the war early. I also noticed that the supply lines/range of the minor races is broken. That is why they are so horrid at using gift ships I suspect. They can't even move ships near the homeworld etc. That needs a fix. Now as to this whole thread again, is there a special command perhaps? Can you order your colony ships to explore star systems and colonize them? Because that was the orders my colonizers had. Other AIs had explored these areas though so is the AI sharing map info amoung all races?

I had a long discussion with a reviewer who kept complaining about the AI, because he saw it cheating. He said it knows where all the best planets are and sends colony ships straight forward to them long before a scout was there.

Stupid question, but was is the version of the game?

BTW, this issue was already raised in this thread https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=162&AID=103881 . And you should take a look to post 122

if this bug were true then the AI could only do it by knowing what the human player knew ! and considering the AI doesn't exploit this any (as it does in games like Rise of Nations and Starcraft) by picking the weakest points in your lines I think that says that this bug or cheat can't exist. Certainly I've never seen it.

I want to note I was writing that as the same time as you brad, just in case you miss the time, so I didn't see that the AI had to specifically scan it with thier ships, but how else did they find it? Minor races are fairly easy to keep an eye on. The messed up ranges have them taking resources way out of range for them right from the begining of the game and without scanning the area. The attack capable ships detection is also rather pointess. Why can't I guard my border with some fleets? Why does that start AI whining at me about ships on his border, especially minor races on the other side of the galaxy? I can't tell what a minor races border is!