Tallima: I found an article from Strategy Informer where they interviewed the developer and he said it didn't cheat.


Si: In what ways will the AI be improved, can the AI adapt to players strategies?

Ian Davis: The first step was to make an AI that doesn’t cheat! We know – there’s nothing more frustrating than realizing that your AI opponent doesn’t have to gather resources like you, epochs up every time you do, and automatically knows where you are.

For Empire Earth 2, we’ve designed an AI that plays that game like a human player. The first part of doing that was designing it to NOT do any of the things I just mentioned. No cheating. EE2’s AI has a multifaceted goal-handling system: resource gathering, map exploration, city-building, territory acquisition, technology progress, diplomacy, unit production, and more. We’ve designed it to approach all of these tasks like a human player would. For example, instead of just pumping out military units and sending them off to your base, the AI builds up battalions and armies, then waits to use them until it’s most advantageous. Our programmers added an algorithm that forces the AI to mimic how a human player would try to extrapolate the location of your base, based on where and how often it begins to spot your units.

Our AI system also uses a collection of different ‘personalities’ that will vary, depending on what civilization it is, what the player’s strategies are, the RPS (rock-paper-scissors unit relationships), the Crowns system, the map type, the weather, the sorts of attacks are brought against it, etc. The result is exactly what you hope for in an AI: each game is different and it’s always responding to your changing strategies with changing strategies of its own.

The AI also makes use of our diplomacy features – AIs will respond to treaty offers, will make their own offers, and will even respond (if they’re allies) to War Plans that you send. It even taunts you.


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Perhaps the computer had a different way to attack you from the ocean???

I only have EE1 Gold, so I can't confirm or deny.

The article I found is located here:

http://www.strategyinformer.com/pc/empireearth2/20/interview.html

nogwart: For example, when you have the AI player all but completely destroyed with its army wiped out and only a handful of buildings left, suddenly on the complete opposite side of the map it would have built up a huge city/settlement with many fighting units.
sappointing.

nogwart: So, I'm wondering, does EE2 have this same "feature", or is it more realistic and fair?

Jesterspawn: It stil cheats in EE2. Or at least it did at the time.

I had EE2 back when it came out. I was playing against a computer opponent on a map that consisted of a single island. I gradually conquered them until they had but a single dock/shipyard, and *nothing else*. I had control of literally every single resource point on the map, and their little dock was walled in. I had ships stationed just far enough away that my ships wouldn't kill their dock, but I would instantly destroy any ships they managed to build and send out.

Surprisingly, they kept sending ships out, despite not having any resources to do so. So, satisfied that I could safely leave the game on "autopilot" for the sake of science, I went home for the night.

I came back the next morning, maybe about 10 hours later, to find the situation had not changed. They still had nothing but their little dock, and they were *still* sending out single ships at regular intervals despite that fact, which were promptly destroyed by my fleets.

The real kicker is that I when I finally destroyed their dock to end the game, the statistics screen showed that (despite my controlling *and gathering* from every resource point on the map) the computer player out-gathered me by a significant margin in every single resource.

So yes. From my own experiment, the EE2 AI most definitely cheats.

FOR SCIENCE!

nogwart: Hi,

My family used to have great fun with Empire Earth (1) LAN games, but eventually we got tired of it because the AI always cheated when it started to lose. For example, when you have the AI player all but completely destroyed with its army wiped out and only a handful of buildings left, suddenly on the complete opposite side of the map it would have built up a huge city/settlement with many fighting units. It took all the fun out of the game for us.

So, I'm wondering, does EE2 have this same "feature", or is it more realistic and fair?

Any thoughts would be most welcome.

EDIT:
I guess no one knows the answer, so I found out for myself.

I purchased EE2 and have played enough of the campaign now to know that YES, indeed the AI does in fact cheat in EE2 just like it did in EE1. I had all possible contact points with the enemy AI walled and well defended, when suddenly a HUGE fleet attacked me from the ocean in my rear which was not connected in any way to the enemy base! Cheater!

Of course, I'll at least play through the campaign anyway, but multiplayer games are probably out of the question now.

How disappointing.

smarison: The AI would get some extra economic boosts to help it build up units when needed (in order to provide a good fight) but that was about it I think.
/scott

narcissus04: I'm glad I've found this thread. I've just saved and exited (probably not to return) after about four hours of fighting three AI characters.

They just keep coming. It's making the game painfully tedious.

Love the EPOCH system though, always fantasised about a game that could start Prehistoric and go right through to futuristic so I might try 2 or even 3.

Nroug7: Don't try 3, just dont.