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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9471249" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I stand by what I said before.This is all well and good, until the players catch on. A computer can hide its lies and cheating a lot better than a human can, and can be rigorously tested for how well it preserves its deceptions during a standard runtime. But, as an example, pretty much everybody these days knows that RTS and TBS "AI" players are cheating bastards. This does, indeed, have significant effects on how people view such games. It means that casual players don't bother with higher difficulties, because they know that difficulty is almost purely artificial anyway. Hardcore players, on the other hand, see it as (more or less) just a handicap to be overcome, an "are you a bad enough dude to save the president" kind of thing, because they know it's not actually outsmarting or outplaying the AI, it's merely playing so well that even a cheating idiot can't beat you. The "strategy" is no longer present because you actually did better, but rather that you can beat a pretty weak player juiced up with cheats.Some games have addressed this by shifting to asymmetrical play, where the computer players have fundamentally different goals. That means you don't have to have computers that cheat; they just have a different victory condition and thus can win by being better at their condition than the players are at theirs. Others use very careful scenario editing, scripted events, and bite-sized missions so the players' advantages can never accrue too much, etc.But there are a rare few games that at least try to make the AI smarter, not just cheating. (To be clear, even the best ones still usually include some of that, but they lean much less on it than others.) Galactic Civilizations is a great example of artificial brilliance, where the AI is smart enough to take subtle steps to prevent other civs from reaching victory conditions by playing them off one another, even if that results in short-term problems.I'd also like to draw a line between what I'll call misdirections and outright lies. AIs getting huge buffs or secret cheat mechanics are lies; they make it seem like the opponent is playing by the same rules when they aren't. But logarithmic health bars? That's not really a lie, it's not presenting something as true when it's not. Instead, it's presenting information in ways that differ from typical experience, with the goal of shaping the emotional response to that information. The logarithmic health bar is still telling you whether your HP are high or low. But it does so while actually giving the character more durability than the player realizes. The game never said the bar was linear. People just assume it must be. Judicious use of such things, which promote a particular emotional response over others, all of which can arise from identical data, is not so much "lying" as...theater. Fiction is not lying, but it is unreal. Same sort of thing.</blockquote>

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