The same as when you catch a human cheating. That is, they don't admit to the weakness of their AI, and try instead to make up for it "under the hood" and when you as the player catch this cheating, and it's never that hard to, you feel inexplicably stupid to have ever thought you were playing a fair match, and losing/winning to fair rules. Games like MoO and Civ make the mistake of having everyone start at the same state, even when its just you vs the AI(s), because they don't treat the two differently - there is only one setup, one goal, one victory condition, regardless of the number of human players. A 50% cheating bonus to production time doesn't mean much when he already started with a 500% bonus in resources and production. What the AI does after that, after the game has started, becomes less important, so what cheating occurs becomes negligible from the perspective of the player. And then the amount of blatant, uninteresting, cheating that has to occur is much more limited - if the AI is not sufficiently challenging, then it's generally simpler to increase his relative size, or resources, or production facilities, or whatever.
The cheating AI gets a set of arbitrarily strong units, justified because its simply a strong country 10x the size of yours. Total War and other 4X games generally have you playing where the AI is also generally unintelligent, but feels more fair, because everyone is in various starting states of strength. I think cheater AI is probably a perfectly good strategy its just the implementation is never done that well, and it ends up cheating in a fashion that isn't actually interesting.Īlternatively, the cheater AI could simply be given an aesthetic reason to validate cheating, instead of trying to pretend its a normal player - eg AI war simply defines the AI as an overwhelming force so overwhelming that it doesn't actually pay much attention to your activity, and that's the only reason you're not dead (your goal is to continue growing without letting the AI noticing). You can't really apply normal strategies like crippling the opponent by poking the edges, or baiting a fight here and having a small force go around to there, or focusing down the infrastructure over the army itself there is only the main body, and that's all that matters. The problem I think is that the cheater AI is unstoppable cheating - his cheating becomes almost independent of his state within the game (true independence is the behavior of actual cheating), such that your path to victory really ends up being complete and total domination.
It was particularly fun and frustrating trying to capture ancient-tech antaran ships in the early/mid game (the game designers were wise enough to equip antaran ships with the quantum detonator tech giving them a very high chance to self destruct nuke their ship's drive when you tried to board them) You needed large fleets of disposable ships with lots of room for boarding parties, tractor beams to pin enemies, and if possible weapons with radiation damage to kill the enemy crew before boarding. It's a bit more Douglas Adams than George Lucas: apologies former citizens, you and your corrosive world needs to be vaporised to work around zoning regulations as part of the empire's galactic terraforming project.Īnother fun way to play the early/mid game was to try to advance up the tech tree by scrapping captured higher tech ships. But if you had a second colony in the system, you could gift your toxic colony to an opponent, then attack it with a stellar converter equipped fleet, fire the stellar converter to destroy the planet and convert it into an asteroid belt, then get your second colony in the system to start an artificial planet construction project to turn the fresh belt into a terraformable barren world. Another cheap trick: in late game after unlocking terraforming & Gaia transformation tech, you could turn any colony into a Gaia world apart from a colony on a toxic planet.
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