[Feedback] Cheating A.I.

I've gotten back up past 1400+ and I'm getting tired of being paired up against the Cardotron 2000 A.I. team or whatever it's called. I play at hours where there's not that many people online and thus get paired against this AI quite often.
To those who haven't fought this team it's a Wizard/Warrior/Priest team that doesn't adhere to the regular race/class/token rules. They all have 29hp and only have high level cards and cards that are not even available to player on items (like multiple Perfect Block).

I think that having cheating AI's is a testiment to poor AI design and I'm disappointed that you have to resort to cheating to make up for lack in AI design.

What inspired me to make this post was once again coming up against them when the timer ran out and having my first 3 attacks being blocked by Perfect Block, a thoroughly broken card that meant i didn't just get blocked but lost the rest of my hand on my warriors as well.

I would suggest you do something about this, as I'm tired of losing rating to a team that you can only beat if you're lucky enough. Possibly remove rating gain/loss from AI's or just this AI.

 

I do still have a standing offer to redesign the AI.

 

I did not know about the checkbox, thanks.

 

Cardotron can feel really unfair, but in it's defense it's not terribly bright and can be beaten with regularity. Designing a really good AI is hard, games that get it right, like Unity of Command, seem to luck into both a game design that the AI can understand and an AI design that fits the game. I understand people's frustration, no one likes to feel the only reason a computer is beating you is because it has a handicap, but the fact of the matter is that nine times out of ten, the computer needs a handicap or it's a laughable opponent. The other one out of ten times, go sacrifice a goat to the game gods, because you have lucked out. Also crowd-sourcing the AI is probably a really good idea with a game as esoteric as Cardhunter, you should really open that up devs.

 

I seriously doubt any AI for a game as complex as Card Hunter is ever going to be a satisfactory substitute for a human opponent. Lookahead (which is what is used for chess and the like) is not going to be very effective, since the game has an extremely high branching factor on account of the large number of cards (any one of which can appear at any time, and some of which, eg. whirlwind, can completely rearrange the board into almost any state.) You can't use more general algorithms, either, because the AI would have to sometimes radically adapt to the opponent's strategy; beyond generally aiming to damage your opponent and avoid being damaged yourself, there isn't any one clear indicator of what a "good" position is, so the AI can't even effectively evaluate possible outcomes with the limited lookahead it's capable of.

I mean, I'm all for it being improved, but the AI alone (using purely a setup a human could manage) would never be anything more than trivial for a skilled player, and would allow them to rack up 30 wins in a day with little real effort at all. It will absolutely have to cheat, no matter how much work is put into improving it.

 

It's true that Cardotron is very dumb, but not only he can put a challenge because of his impressive cards, but what most bothers me is something else that happened a lot to me and to other players as well (I spectated different matches vs Cardotron to corroborate this): failing multiple blocks and armors in the same turn with the same character. For example, I had a warrior with two Hard To Pin Down and one Hardy Mail, so I sent him close to his warrior. Then he uses me 2 different attacks, one of them was his 20 damage attack. I roll all 2 the first time, and all 1 the second.
This is just an example, it happened to me many times against Cardotron, and not when I'm facing other players. So, I can accept the fact that they give better cards to Cardotron to compensate his bad A.I, but I can't stand this kind of cheating, that's why I chose not to face him anymore.

 

Uh, that sounds random to me. Bad luck, but well within the realm of possibility. Why do you assume that Cardotron is "cheating" ? Maybe we should wait to get a confirmation from the devs about that before jumping to conclusions . . .

 

Well, it's very strange that it happens only with Cardotron. Let me explain this better. If I'm playing against another player and I have several (3, for example) cards with a dice (could be two armors and 1 block, 3 blocks, 3 armors, etc.), I can roll any number in each of them. But when I play against Cardotron, many times it's the same number in all of them, so if I roll a 1 in the first one, then I roll a 1 in the rest, and same with other numbers. At first I thought it was strange but just bad luck, but when it started to repeat I sensed something was wrong. A few days ago I decided to spectate a match against Cardotron ( it was vs ArcadianRook) to see if it was still happening, and guess what, it happened again (probably he doesn't even remember, but I saw it: three 1 in a row with one of his guys).
Anyway, I didn't mean to accuse anybody, maybe I just have extremely bad luck against him. At least they give as the chance to decide if we want to face him or not.

 

Potentially worth a read of this thread (from about a year ago) about the RNG in the game: https://forums.cardhunter.com/threads/enemy-rolls-seem-anything-but-random.727/page-2#post-8747

Which I would assume still stands =D