Apparently my posts on this forum have become somewhat controversial, but I guess I'm getting used to that. Recently on a different forum regarding a different game some of my posts were originally considered controversial, eventually got me flamed by a few individuals, and ultimately won me an award as their best strategy columnist. Bromley has asked me to post a summary of my position because apparently some people have been referring to my posts as evidence that there is no loadgame bug.
In some respects, they are correct. The problem here is the word "bug". To a programmer, a bug is a clear and undetected error that produces incorrect or unintended results or an interruptive abberation in the behavior of a program, such as divide-by-zero errors or integer overflows or a deadlock due to improper use of synchronization objects. I have encountered, tracked down, and eliminated many such bugs over the last 20+ years, and this does not truly qualify as a "bug." I assure you that if you were to refer to it in those terms to the developer(s) responsible for the AI that they would take at least a small amount of offense to it. In fact, as a fellow programmer, I take a small amount of offense to it myself on their behalf. I do wish everyone would adopt a more accurate description such as the "load game reassessment behavior" or "load game reassessment anomaly".
What we are dealing with here is a peculiar behavior of the reassessment strategy under conditions of polar extrema -- beginning from the opening move of the game, without player interaction except for the refusal of all alliances which serves to reinforce the extrema. I'm not undermining this test, because it quite possibly gives us some insight into the viability of the the algorithms and heurisms used by the AI throughout the course of the game, including midgame and endgame, in the absence of such extrema.
There is a clear tendency for the reassessment that occurs after a load game to often (not always) reverse diplomatic decisions and to relieve sieges. It's also clear that this behavior tends to diminish or manifest itself in a different way as the game moves away from a position of extrema. Unfortunately, I'm one of the few people who has apparently studied the phenomenon with that possibility in mind, although Bromley is moving in the same direction. It helps to have a large database of saved games to draw from.
I think there are some weaknesses with the research that's been undertaken here. It seems that many people have reached "obvious", foregone conclusions from their observations of this fairly limited test, projecting those "absolutes" to the conclusion of the game even when the extrema is removed. There is no support for such conclusions except inasmuch as they can be supported semantically. There is virtually no empirical evidence as to the resulting strength of the AI opposition as a whole due to the AI's reassessment behavior.
There are also a few conclusions that are entirely accurate, although unsupported empirically, such as the fact that the load game behavior will allow the human player more time to acquire rebel territories and more time to develop them than the AI factions, which definitely gives the human player an advantage. I think this could easily be supported empirically, although the mathematical analysis would be quite challenging.
There has been very little attempt to understand the reasoning behind the AI's behavior, which I consider to be a key factor in suggesting how it might be changed. To simply say, "The AI needs to stop relieving sieges" could very well introduce another undesirable behavior in the AI. In order to understand the decision-making process of the AI, and how it might be improved, it is important to analyze those scenarios where the AI is behaving in a different manner than that which was observed under conditions of extrema.
In other words, I think the research here is a good start, but incomplete. It is not conclusive because it does not exhibit empirical evidence of the projected conclusions.
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