Hey, only I can be allowed to derive guilty pleasure from this thread.

...

Well, okay. You've been good - you get to do it, too.

But then there definitely is a bug - the first & third income charts don't jibe! They conflict.

Three players can't all have the same "Credit income rate", yet have three different "Credits gained from planet income". But they do/will! Hard's credits gained are 1.5 times that of Normal's. And Unfair's is 2X.

Same bug for Metal & Crystal charts.

FoePa, your debug screenshots do NOT necessarily conflict with the evidence provided by the endgame graphs. All we see in your screenshot is a "value" of 10.1. So what are the possibilities for what this 10.1 is?
1) # of credits received last tick.
2) # of credits to be received next tick.
3) internal "credit income rate" which could undergo further transformations in order to determine actual credits received by the player.

Honestly, I think (3) seems logical and makes sense from a code architecture standpoint. The scenario is that you have a core game engine object which is separated from the individual player objects (This is a good thing as it prevents AI 'cheating' by looking directly into the engine. If the AI only has access to the same entry points as a human player, it gets affected by the same "fog of war"). So the core engine calculates a credit income value based on planet populations, research, etc. Then, a higher level part of the engine controls the actions that are taken each tick (one of those being awarding income). This part knows the players and each tick it takes that player's credit income value and determines how many actual credits to award. This could be based on a number of factors, but so far we've only seen evidence for AI difficulty (human being treated as 'normal') via the third graph.

For all those crying for definitive proof...make a game against some AIs, and record it a few seconds after start. Watch the recording and pause it after every credit increase. Then examine each player's credit totals. I did that and have put the results in the table below (sorry if formatting doesn't come through). Please explain what micromanaging the hard AI could possibly be doing that awards it an extra 5-6 (and only 5-6) credits every second.



ticks my creds normal creds hard creds unfair creds


1 3011 3011 3017 3023
2 3023 3023 3034 3046
3 3034 3034 3051 3068
4 3046 3046 3068 3091
5 3057 3057 3085 3114
6 3068 3068 3102 3137
7 3080 3080 3119 3159
8 3091 3091 3137 3182
9 3102 3102 3154 3205

Thanks JediLennier, an excellent table, and as good of definitive proof as any. I surely don't know of any possible micromanaging that could possibly award an extra 5-6 credits per seconds (a 50% boost over Normal's 11.33 cred/sec rate!). And I've looked for one, as well as examined Hard's early moves, and there simply isn't an explanation. Remember, my original questioning was prompted by an analysis of Hard's early tech tree purchases, (w/ multiple sources of information, rather than "blindly trusting the endgame charts").

Some notes & observations: We start the game (at tick 0) with 3000 credits available. By your tick 3, the 1.0 to 1.5 to 2.0 ratio of income for Normal to Hard to Unfair is clearly appararent (51/34=1.5 & 68/34=2). I assume the slight variation from these ratios is due to rounding errors.

Regards, Obi Won   

Then maybe you could spend a few less minutes insulting FoePa for not accepting your claims on faith alone and actually provide proof of concept here.

Sage, I never said they were useless. I said you don't know what points are monitored. You you can not reasonably use them as a diagnostic tool because you have variables that you can not account for. You really just like to argue don't you. Tell you the truth your don't confuse me with the facts style is impressive.

So why haven't you loaded up the debugger and presented this conclusive evidence?
Put up or shut up. You prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. I am not argueing that you are wrong remember, I am arguing that I don't know positively and neither do you.

I never said that he used different races. I just said it wasn't accounted for in his post. A master of the strawman as well I see.

Have you thought about a career as a spin doctor, I understand they are very rewarding.

Thanks Mazuo for taking care of the minutes argument, I was really sweating that one.

All you really have to do is get someone from IC to say we changed it it cheats now.

SageWon you need to think like a TEC scout. An axiom for you, "If its out there I'll find it." or Maybe something from the Xfiles "I want to believe."

Can't we just agree to disagree and end this?

I think you have it backward there Mazuo. We HAVE been providing proof, and he chooses not to believe it based on faith in "official" posts and accepted common knowledge. I, and Legerdemain before me, have already pointed out that his supposed counter proof doesn't actually counter the argument as there is ambiguity in what his numbers represent, but he chooses to ignore those comments. I'm still waiting for an actual verifiable counter argument here, but I won't be holding my breath....

Kittun, do you think it is possible that Frogboy was mistaken? Or possibly meant to refer to the Unfair difficulty level only?

Coming from a too-long stint on WoW, I find this statement quaintly amusing. Do you honestly think that the person who wrote that is the same one who wrote the income distribution system or that there could have been no miscommunications and that all statements in the entire changelog were thoroughly fact-checked against the entire codebase?

PS "no other AI cheating" could be referring to other forms of cheating besides income boosts.

Not all, silly. Just the ones you have contradictory evidence for.

Does someone really have to explain this to you? You assume statements from the devs are true unless proven otherwise. The italicized word there is what you've been missing.



You've lied twice now. I haven't insulted you yet in this topic. If you'd like me to start, I'm certainly game.



Saying that outside of the resource boost given to the Unfair difficulty AI, there are NO other AI methods of cheating isn't definitive? Wow.



You seem to also fail to understand what a proof is. The rest of your post is more bluster revolving around the notion that if you say it enough times, people will believe you. Good luck with that.

So now, are you going to continue to spell my name wrong and harass me because you haven't provided sufficient evidence of your claims, or are you going to get back to actually figuring out how exactly the Hard AI cheats in resource income with facts to back it up? I bet you can figure out what my guess is.

It just seems to be a mountain, but really it's just a mole hill.

@FoePa
Actually I am on your side of things. As far as the whole ai thing goes. Take deep breath.

@All
This thread needed a little lighting up. So flame away.