What that complaint usually means is “The AI is too hard, I would like easier wins”.
That may be true in some cases, but in many other cases the AI really does cheat, and it cheats because it’s not smart enough to offer a challenge to good players without cheating.
That may be true in some cases, but in many other cases the AI really does cheat
My answer did not imply that the AI doesn’t cheat :-/
The interesting questions here involve the perception of fairness and the illusion of competing with a more-or-less equal in single-player games. When people say the AI cheats they mean that it’s not bound by the rules applied to the human player, but why should it be? Consider MMORGs—do mobs cheat, e.g. by using abilities that the player does not have? Do raid bosses cheat by having a gazillion HP, gaining temporary invulnerability, spawning adds, and generally being a nuisance?
In MMORPGS, the game and setting are usually asymmetrical by design—there’s no assumption that the human knight should have an equal amount of hit points as the ancient dragon, and it would actually violate the logic of the setting if that were the case.
The games where people do complain about AI cheating tend to put the enemies in a more symmetrical role—e.g. in something like Civilization or Starcraft, the game designers work to actively maintain an illusion that the AI players are basically just like human players and operating under the same rules.
If you break that illusion too blatantly, players will be reasonably annoyed, because they feel like the game is telling them one thing when the truth is actually different.
This may even have in-game ramifications: e.g. if I’m playing against a human opponent in a multiplayer match, I might want to keep my units hidden from him so that he doesn’t know what I’m up to, but this is pointless against an AI opponent that sees the entire map all the time. (IIRC, in the original Red Alert, the Soviet player could construct buildings that recreated the shroud of war in areas that the enemy had already explored—and which were totally useless in single player, since the AI was never subject to the shroud of war!) In that case it’s not just the player feeling cheated, it actively screws up the player’s idea of what exactly would be a good idea against the AI.
That may be true in some cases, but in many other cases the AI really does cheat, and it cheats because it’s not smart enough to offer a challenge to good players without cheating.
My answer did not imply that the AI doesn’t cheat :-/
The interesting questions here involve the perception of fairness and the illusion of competing with a more-or-less equal in single-player games. When people say the AI cheats they mean that it’s not bound by the rules applied to the human player, but why should it be? Consider MMORGs—do mobs cheat, e.g. by using abilities that the player does not have? Do raid bosses cheat by having a gazillion HP, gaining temporary invulnerability, spawning adds, and generally being a nuisance?
In MMORPGS, the game and setting are usually asymmetrical by design—there’s no assumption that the human knight should have an equal amount of hit points as the ancient dragon, and it would actually violate the logic of the setting if that were the case.
The games where people do complain about AI cheating tend to put the enemies in a more symmetrical role—e.g. in something like Civilization or Starcraft, the game designers work to actively maintain an illusion that the AI players are basically just like human players and operating under the same rules.
If you break that illusion too blatantly, players will be reasonably annoyed, because they feel like the game is telling them one thing when the truth is actually different.
This may even have in-game ramifications: e.g. if I’m playing against a human opponent in a multiplayer match, I might want to keep my units hidden from him so that he doesn’t know what I’m up to, but this is pointless against an AI opponent that sees the entire map all the time. (IIRC, in the original Red Alert, the Soviet player could construct buildings that recreated the shroud of war in areas that the enemy had already explored—and which were totally useless in single player, since the AI was never subject to the shroud of war!) In that case it’s not just the player feeling cheated, it actively screws up the player’s idea of what exactly would be a good idea against the AI.