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OH NO! I finally figured it out!!

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OH NO! I finally figured it out!!

from Stardock Forums
Okay, remember for the past few days we've had these heated debates about whether the AI was being exploited with tribute for techs.

Then a few days later we figured out that paying the AI tribute actually counted as a negative expense (i.e. it SUBTRACTED the money from your expenses in effect giving you money).

Olaf on QT3 finally got me thinking about it and I just realized why the AI was accepting those deals. It was EXPLOITING THE HUMAN. The AI doesn't know the INTENT of the rules, it only knows the rules of the game. And from its vantage point, paying you X for Y turns was lowering its expenses for that time. So it was accepting these deals because they were good for it. The update I made earlier in the weak weakened this in other ways but it didn't get around the basic issue - the AI got money by trading you money for tech.

In short, it's not you guys who were cheesing/exploiting the AI. It was the AI cheesing/exploiting us.

Fix going in today. Sorry about that.

The cause is that the function pCivilization->CalcTributeOut() returns a NEGATIVE number (negative income). But it's treated as an expense in the income/expense calcuation.

~SDC~
1,950 views 33 replies
Reply #26 from Stardock Forums Top
The first time I ever had that happen to me was on an Apple II, wrote a game to play 4x4x4 Tic-Tac-Toe. Didn't matter who went first, it won. The original version suffered one defeat on its highest level in several months of play. Then I found a bug in my programming, fixed it, and it didn't play nearly as well. Left me wishing I still had a copy of the program with the bug in it :(
Reply #27 from Stardock Forums Top
This ought to really change the money supply in the game... hm... formerly we were printing it freely (sort of)withut inflation... now the money supply will be mor truly limited to the wealth of planets. This could really change the game.

~SDC~
Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #28 from Stardock Forums Top
"This ought to really change the money supply in the game... hm... formerly we were printing it freely (sort of)withut inflation... now the money supply will be mor truly limited to the wealth of planets. This could really change the game."

Yeah, looks like my patented "tribute-based economy" is about to get thrown out the window... :( So much for using other Civs' money to pay the maintence costs of the fleet of Dreadnoughts I was using to wipe them all out. :p

- Ash

~SDC~
Reply #29 from Stardock Forums Top
Yeah, well, that tactic was kinda simple to begin with. I'm glad to see it go, though I hope I can still get -some- cash off of them. :)

~SDC~
Reply #30 from Stardock Forums Top
I had a cultural victory some days ago, where I got an imensely increasing income by increasing the months in the trade to a gigantic amount, funny where two things:
if typing a too large number into the month field, it gets a overflow, and substracts the time you entered from the maximal amount it was able to handle.
Also the AI does not care if its 1000 or 100000 months, so you can actually get a "infinite" time of 5-10 bucks per tech... now it seems THEY got that too! >:( eeeevil!
At the end of the game I had almost 300 per month just by that, but I only started to do that 10-20 years ago, so the ridiculous time of the tribute did actually not mather much. Also this was on a sub normal level (the third-worst I think)

~SDC~
Reply #31 from Stardock Forums Top
"Yeah, well, that tactic was kinda simple to begin with."

No tactic that works is simple. I can accept that it was a flaw in the AI that allowed it, and accept that it needs to be fixed, but it's not "simple" to take advantage of an unintelligent opponent.

- Ash

~SDC~
Reply #32 from Stardock Forums Top
-shrug- If it always works, then it's simple. Doesn't make it -wrong-. I wasn't trying to make a value judgment on it, aside from saying that it was perhaps a little too much of a sure thing.

~SDC~
Reply #33 from Stardock Forums Top
Hey! That explains why the Scottlians got so rich when I thought I was robbing them blind playing Galactic Banker. A coupla revision ago, that is.