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Agreed, this is an instant turn-off for me when I realize this in e.g. an RTS game. Red Alert or C&C come to mind on higher difficulty, can't remember which.

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IIRC the RA1 skirmish mode AIs always had perfect information and resource multipliers based on difficulty. RA2 did it a little differently with "virtual ore purifiers" added for the high difficulty AIs. I'm sure a similar thing was done for the Tiberian Dawn campaign and the Tiberian Sun multiplayer/skirmish AIs.

OpenRA's bots are a bit more clever, and also don't need to magically see into fog-of-war.

I never played much of RA2, but played hundreds of hours of RA1 skirmish. Must have been that. Thanks for the insight!

Skirmish was a blast- I'd turtle until I had the enormous battleships (cruisers?) that could fire onto land. Loads of fun when I was like 12.

Civilization uses a similar technique, and it’s the reason I’ve been thinking about the potential here.

The AI on higher difficulty starts a few centuries more technologically advanced than you, and gets multipliers on the starting resources like cities.

It’s not particularly fun to compete against.

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