Brit

There is no scripting in the AI's technology research. What the AI does is look at the nearby technologies that it hasn't discovered (and by "nearby" I mean technologies that are only a few steps away from his current known technologies). The AI then evaluates the value of each of these technologies. If it's a technology that upgrades units and he has a lot of those types of units, he's more likely to pick that technology (example: if he has a lot of class 1 tanks, he's more likely to go after a technology that upgrades them to class 2 tanks than he is to go after a technology that upgrades battleships when he has no battleships). If a technology gives building upgrades, then he evaluates the usefulness of the building and comes up with a score for that technology. This means, for example, if you create a custom ruleset with a factory that gives a +1% production bonus, it will get a low score and he'll be less likely to research it. But, if you create a factory that gives a +100% bonus, then he'll probably go after it quickly. All of these factors are also influenced by the cost of the technology, as well. Lower research points are favored over technologies that cost lots of research points.

Hm. You should be able to see other people in the internet chat room, regardless of the port-forwarding setup. Although, there might be occasional glitches in seeing other people. Have you tried this several times, and it never works?

Wait, what? It wouldn't surprise me if the AI was sending units after enemy units that are nearby (even if they are outside view range). The AI does get a production bonus, but it isn't like a 400% production bonus (like they apparently do sometimes in MOO2). I just looked it up, and the Expert AI gets a 30% production bonus. Actually, I think Civilization 4 does something like that - it keeps track of units with a slightly larger view range and it can see units for a few turns after they've disappeared into the FOW, so it seems like it might not be a bad solution if they're making it work. One of the other issues involves bringing enough units to a fight. For example, if the AI is going to invade an island, it shouldn't bring too few or too many units. With FOW working, it's necessary for the AI to do more patrols (which wouldn't be a bad thing) and potentially anticipate the number of units that a player normally places on an island.

Alright, let's not stir things up again. I'm just asking people to take a step back and avoid responding negatively for a while because it invites counter-responses.

I tried reproducing this, but haven't had any luck. In one case, I even got the 'skull' icon that said the blimp was moving out too far, but the blimp was still able to return. (It was right on the edge of the return range).

Well, the AI needs to do a little more than that. I'm afraid that he might be too docile if he did that. For example, if he sighted one of your ships, but then you moved out of view range, then according to this algorithm, he'd act like your ship didn't exist anymore. A human player, on the other hand, might send a few ships or aircraft to the area to scout you out again because he knows you're still around.

The AI is actually pretty bad at anticipating an attack. It doesn't know if you're heading towards him, have the ships stationed in one place for the last 10 turns, or if you're moving away. It knows that you're at a location, not which direction you're heading. As far as the battleship example, the AI isn't good at fleeing. It tries to choose units appropriate for the target, but it also uses distance as a guide (preferring to use units that are closer to the target than farther away). It also depends on what else is going on in the game. I actually think I'd have to run a test to see what the AI would do. The AI doesn't rely on scripts. It's a pretty complex formula that takes a whole bunch of things into account, and I think I'd have to try it to see. As far as the invasion example, he would see your location, but not your direction, so he probably wouldn't react to it as strongly as he should if he knew you were heading towards the island. However, he still sees a bunch of units that are nearby, and, as enemies, he should probably attack them as a way of degrading your combat abilities. It would also push him to build more units (units with short build times in particular) as opposed to, say, city improvements or big ships.

I'm at a loss to guess out why it's crashing. My only idea at this point is to put some more debug information into the startup so that I can figure out where exactly it's crashing and maybe that would give me a hint. I'll put my email address into your private messages, and you can send me an email.

I wonder if that's a new bug introduced recently. I'll see if I can reproduce it. I think there might still be a bug in the system where, if you tell an aircraft to move out near it's maximum range, it moves slightly too far and can't return home. I thought I fixed that, but maybe not quite.

Okay, guys, thanks for the support. I'd like to close down the back-and-forth, so we'll consider this thread done. I won't actually close the thread, but know that any replies trigger more replies as people try to defend themselves.

Okay, guys, thanks for the support. I'd like to close down the back-and-forth, so we'll consider this thread done. I won't actually close the thread, but know that any replies trigger more replies as people try to defend themselves.

If you have the latest update, then there is no copy protection at all. It's just a regular exe. No, there's no serial number needed. Are you getting a Debug.txt file in your install directory?

Notable Fixes/Improvements: - Fixed crash that can happen when trading resource-sources - Fixed a bug with ships leaving the city to attack ground units and blocking ground units from entering the city - Fixed bug: when 'all players are at war', the initial team settings were ignored. This is fixed now. - The technology window's items-in-production list won't snap back to the top - Added a hotkey to cycle through the idle cities

Yeah, that's the latest version. And you said you get a license screen when you startup, or was the license screen something you were seeing before running the updater? Hm, the latest version should work. And there shouldn't be anything in the registry that's messing things up. I'm at a loss to explain what's going on. There hasn't been anyone else reporting this problem, so it seems like it must be something particular to your system. Did you say whether you have any anti-virus programs running?

Yes, I stop by the thread probably every other day now. To answer a few questions and clear up the confusion: (1) Rich asked for ten games that use a cheating AI. Actually, it would be much more difficult to find ten games without a cheating AI. I know of only two strategy games that claim to use a non-information-cheating AI (and I say "non-information cheating" specifically because even if an AI doesn't get special knowledge they are typically given varieties of combat or production bonuses that human players don't have). The two games that claim not to information-cheat are Galactic Civilizations series and Empire. I've heard people complain that they've caught the Galactic Civ game doing information cheats - the AI was targeting spaceships deep in the human player's territory that they shouldn't have known about, and the AI gets lots of production and maintenance bonuses. As pointed out earlier, Grigsby's games cheats. I also posted videos about AI cheats in the Civilization series. I don't know about information cheats, but I know Masters of Orion 2 AI had lots of cheats: "in some games the AI players get 4 times as much production and other insane advantages." (says one of the MOO2 developers). The harder levels of Starcraft would get bonus resources. Actually, it's safe to assume that all strategy games cheat unless they explicitly say otherwise (and even then, you have to parse out exactly what they said). See lots of examples of cheating AI here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheComputerIsACheatingBastard http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=287115 Personally, I don't believe that the "other games don't cheat" argument is something that can be taken seriously. The only reason it's brought up or believed is because it's hoped that it can be used as a lever to get a non-information cheating AI created. In other words, making EOS seem like an aberration in a sea of non-cheating AIs is a better way to get things done than saying that EOS is just one of many cheating AIs. (2) As for the claim that I wasn't upfront with customers about the cheating AI and it borders on fraud: since most games do cheat (but most people don't realize it until they catch the AI doing something he shouldn't know about), and since I've always been upfront answering that question on the forums, I don't see how the "fraud" claim holds any weight. Certainly, if I was lying about it on the forums, you could say that, but I never even tried to evade the question about the AI. (3) I'm sure that I've said in the past that I wanted to make a non-cheating AI. I'm confident that I said that because I still believe it would be a good thing to make a non-cheating AI. However, I don't believe I ever promised to make a non-cheating AI. Some people are accusing me of making promises about this, and I don't think I promised anything. (4) People are complaining that I asked in a poll what I should work on and the AI was voted up highest. So, what happened? Well, I did work on the AI. I cleaned up a whole bunch of AI problems immediately after that poll came though. The reason you see a drop in the number of bug fixes right after the poll is because I was so busy working on the AI that all the other bug fixes took a dip. It might've looked like I wasn't working on anything, but it was difficult to enumerate all the AI fixes I had done so many of them weren't broken out individually. After that, I got behind on a bunch of other fixes, like crashes, and so I started fixing the backlog of bugs that accumulated while I was fixing issues with the AI. How long will it take to make the ultimate AI that players are clamoring for? I don't know. A long time. After one of the players suggested (via email) a way to access and change the AI, and I've considered moving the AI out into a separate dll. (It already runs in it's own process.) At that point, I could open-source it. I don't know how much work I can put into it. I can imagine a variety of scenarios: I could work on the AI or not work on the AI. Other interested people could work on the AI or not work on the AI. The reality is that I've earned far less than minimum wage for my 5.5 years of work. As a result, I'm deeply buried in debt, my credit cards are maxed out, and I owe lots of money to people. Heck, I'm so strapped that I've procrastinated on getting new brakes put on my car for the past six months despite dire warnings from my car mechanic. Working on the AI would be a volunteer, non-paying effort for me. At best, it would be an academic thing - i.e. a chance to play around with some other approaches to AI. I'm also working more than 40 hours a week at a new job. Despite what was said earlier in the thread, I don't believe that making a non-cheating AI is a "moral obligation". Rather, it's something that some players really want to have added to the game. From my side, I'm looking at hundreds or thousands of extra hours on a project that was a financial disaster for me and won't return any significant reward for that additional time investment. So, you might imagine why I'm not going promise anything. I know that won't make some of the people on this thread happy, but committing myself to something that could take over a thousand hours of work for no pay when I'm already broke won't make me happy. So, I guess this is the part where you flame the bankrupt guy.

No, all buyers (both early buyers and late buyers) have the same version of the game. I saw your help ticket, but I'll just try to answer your question here. I was going to suggest the same thing that shauny1987 did: make sure you're running as administrator. If you run the updater application after reinstalling the game, then you should never see the license screen. (You may also need to set the Updater application to 'run as administrator' so it can write the latest version of the game to your hard drive.) If you single-click on EOS.exe, what version does Windows say you have? It will be something like "1.0.107", "1.01.8xxx", "1.01.15821", or something along those lines.

Hey guys, it's nice that people are interested in the future of the game, but remember that people tend to behave with reciprocity: treat someone well and they'll respond in kind, attack someone and they'll respond in kind. It seems like we're getting into a cycle of the latter. The solution is to avoid responding in kind when someone attacks.

Yeah, kind of a crazy transition, huh?

You could run the Updater application and bring the game up to the latest version. Let me know if you're still having problems after that.

Interesting. I tried his Empire game a number of years back. I played something like 100 turns when the demo ended, then I looked at the map and discovered that the AI player hadn't left his starting island. I kind of passed-off the game at that point. Maybe I happened to grab the game demo when the AI was still really bad. Also, I ran a test last night with EDEE to check if it was cheating. I setup a scenario where there were only a few widely spaced islands. I wanted to see if his transports would magically know where the other islands were. The AI flew his planes out to their maximum range, couldn't see any other islands, and, while his ships didn't go out exploring to find some new islands*, they didn't make a straight-path to the other islands (which would've been evidence of cheating). So, I have to give him credit for that - it doesn't look like it's cheating. * The situation where your aircraft can't find new landmasses probably doesn't happen very much in randomly generated maps, so it's probably not a terrible bug that his ships weren't going out to find new landmasses.

Population increases automatically, but the rate of increase is based on your food reserves. If you have low food reserves, your population grows slowly. If you have lots of food, your population grows faster. It never grows quickly, but there is an increase. Roads are created at the beginning of the game and don't change. So, there's no road-building unit. I'm working on a contract for NASA. Seems like interesting work.

What ever ended up happening with that? I googled to find out if EDEE had any AI cheats, and saw some of your posts critical of the AI in EDEE. (Example: "As shadows says, Gal Civ has a good ai as do a lot of games. Too bad EDEE isn't one of them. I played two complete games and the flaws that I, and several others on the forum, discovered literally make the game unplayable solo.") The forum posts seemed to indicate that the EDEE developer wasn't going to improve the AI, but he was talking about allowing players to develop their own AI and put it into a DLL: Did he end up working on the AI or did someone else? By 2007, he seemed to suggest that he still wasn't happy with how well the non-cheating AI actually functioned. In 2007, the developer of EDEE wrote:

As far as Gary Grigsby's War in the East, I looked up some on google and discovered that the AI ignores those settings. Here's a link to the information: Source: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ArOB8LPvJZ4J:www.matrixgames.com/forums/fb.asp%3Fgo%3Dnext%26m%3D2662396%26viewType%3Dtm+%22Gary+Grigsby%22+%22war+in+the+east%22+AI+knowledge+cheats&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a It's actually uncommon for game AI to use actual fog of war. As far as continuing to work on the game full-time, I think you'd understand and sympathize with my situation better if I explained what happened financially - and how much of the development cost I ended up taking as a loss. So, I'll post that information tomorrow.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I doubt it would make that much of a difference. Besides, I've already accepted some new work. It's hard getting games into stores because they want it to move otherwise it's using up valuable shelf space that could be used to sell something else. Haven't tried Amazon, but tried Steam and GamersGate. You could throw them onto imageshack or something. Thanks. No, I'm not a Brit. But, yes, my real first name is Brit (similar to "Bret").

Thanks. The original idea for freighters is that they would give some bonuses to production. They would move around automatically between cities on different islands. If someone happened to be doing naval combat against you they can come in and start sinking your freighters, which would reduce your empire's ability to produce new stuff. No, there's no way to make units like hovercraft that function on both the land and sea. I suppose the closest thing would be to create an air unit, but that has some problems as well since air units ignore terrain. By the way, did you have a question about extra icons?