Is the AI given an advantage over the player?

[City Builder]

Hi,

I was playing a game and the AI player (AdmiralAI) started up and immediately placed a 1x1 station between my 1x1 next to a forest and built his lines to drop off the wood down at the same place that I was dropping my lumber at. This is fine and all and I don't mind some competition, however...

His trains were always filled up at an alarming high rate compared to my trains. His trains might be able to make 2 trips with full loads over to the lumbermill before my two small trains that only had 7 cars and 3 cars respectively were even full yet.

I don't know if because he occupied a closer space to the forest that he got the larger amount of lumber loaded on his trains or if the game just simply favors the AI player and gives them the preference of loading resources faster and in greater quantity over the players stations that are only seperated from the AI's station by one grid square.

Does the AI get favorable treatment in OTTD, or maybe it is something else and since I am a noob I don't know all the ins and outs of how things work so it may well be something else that won't even dawn on me why I had to eventually shut down those two lines simply because I couldn't get them to fill up with lumber while the AI's trains were making jolly trips back and foth with full lumber cars.

[Yexo]

AI companies are handled exactly the same as human companies.

The station with the highest station rating gets the majority of the cargo. See the wiki page on station rating for how to improve your rating.

[Morloth]

I had a similar experience once when battling with AdmiralAI, but I found out that AdmiralAI actually builds statues to pump up its ratings. After I build a statue as well the rations were normalized and I got the same amount of cargo. It's a good idea to check out how station ratings are handled and how it affects the cargo distribution between multiple stations.

Although I must say in some instances if multiple trains are waiting for the same cargo with rations around: 80%, 70% and 65% that the one with 65% hardly gets any cargo at all. So make sure you stations ratings are higher and if not, have a chat with the local authorities, see if they can sort things out for you .

[Bilbo]

AI's even have slight disadvantage over humans, as with the current API they can't see opponents vehicles and stations (they can theoretically walk the entire map and see if there is "something built by opponent", but they don't have any functions like humans have to view all opponent's stations, vehicles, etc ...in some list)

[Zuu]

On the other hand, AIs could baby sit many more vehicles than players and eg. Load eg. Every 5:th day or so it could go through all vehicles and make sure there is only one vehicle waiting at stations etc. or implement load 50% or at maximum 20 days etc. Of course there is a trade of between baby sitting vehicles or planing new routes etc. but still AIs could baby sit many more vehicles than players could and still do some building.