_H2O wrote:Thank you for taking the time to do this analysis on your game. Please PM me a link to the game on age com. I keep a watch on this sort of thing. I recently played someone on vanilla where they did something similar (spawning 10 falcs and 10 culvs instantly several times throughout a 45 minute game). I maintain a list of cheating accounts for people who I find doing this consistently. I think lots of people are curious or do dumb things once and a while, but some people consistently do these things.
Heres some ways I have found cheating:
1. Add up all the buildings they made, all the units they made and if its more than they gathered then they cheated. Be careful on this one, it should be a large difference otherwise you likely just miscalculated. This is what you did and is the most conclusive
2. Another way to check is to look at gather rates vs villager counts. If someone has half your villager count but is gathering equal to you and you are not idled etc. This one is a lot harder to pinpoint. You can also see weird spikes in gather rates (like in a game when someone gets wood crates their wood goes from zero gather rate to high gather rate). It is trickier to do this analysis.
3. Explorer reviving on its own at 100 HP. This is a sign of invisible units near by. The map hack from moesbar places invisible spyglasses on the map. They revive explorer. Make sure no native scout is possible then very likely cheating.
4. Villager counts grow in ways not possible. Look for spikes where 5 CDB came in instead of 4. Oh and its also off sync with tc production so its impossible for a villager to come out of the tc. I played a guy as dutch who blatantly spawned 30 settlers. Also have played a france player who spawned 2 settlers by accident, deleted them, then spawned his cdb.
In the mid range PR unknown players are cheating quite a bit from my experience the past few weeks.
Those were good ones.
I'd also add you can check "free units" in the resources tab : it shows all the units you get from shipments and treasures. If the guy has more free units than possible (for example one guy once had 80 free units in colonial as france, while the max is somewhere close to 20 when you send all cdbs + 8 bows + 3 huss) it most likely means he's cheating. Be careful with some civs like china though, they get an insane amount of free units without any cheat.
Check the xp graph : once a guy had +2k xp at 5 min in the game. Since he was aztec he could have used the market BB, but he didn't have a market and didn't even gather the 500g you need for this BB. You can check all those graphs anyway and if something is weird, like a huge resources/vils/units spike, it most likely means he's cheating.
You can also use all graphs together to check his shipments. I once spotted a guy doing a 4 cdb / 700w / 3 huss / 700g semi while aging at 7:30. Looking at the graph, I saw he got those shipments 20 sec from each other instead of the normal 40 sec. That means he cheated.
I once also spotted the guy made no houses while massing stuff. Like he had 1 house for the whole game, you can see that looking at the map or even in the "buildings" graph. It means he's spawning his stuff regardless of population limits, so cheating too.
So if you use all those tricks whenever you feel like you've been cheated (for example if the guy plays like shit but still gets OP mass, or has inflated score etc) it's almost impossible to not spot the cheat. Then you can just take screens and share