When does cheating make a game more realistic?

[MonkeySage]

I've been playing CK2, and I've realized that a lot of the miraculous conquests of historical characters require extensive cheating on the part of the computer. It's not called cheating by the game, but that's basically what it is.
William the Bastard's conquest of England, for example. He magically gets a claim on the Kingdom, and a huge event army that he'd never be able to raise naturally without already having either very deep pockets or a lot of land on his own.

[Grif]

I've been playing CK2, and I've realized that a lot of the miraculous conquests of historical characters require extensive cheating on the part of the computer. It's not called cheating by the game, but that's basically what it is.
William the Bastard's conquest of England, for example. He magically gets a claim on the Kingdom, and a huge event army that he'd never be able to raise naturally without already having either very deep pockets or a lot of land on his own.

It's only "cheating" because the current CK2 engine (and indeed all of Paradox's games) still does not model the rapid upheavals and fluid changes that sometimes result during those times very well. It's why you see workarounds like these (Willy getting a claim on the kingdom at the start, with event troops to help him along). See also: Mongol invasion pre-Horse Lords, Magyar invasion of Hungary, the Burgundian Inheritance in EU4, the various events Germany gets in HOI3 to simulate their rapid rise to major power.

It's not a problem per se, IMO, but indicative of the current limitations of the simulation/game. More realistic? Eh, insofar that it happened in history, yes. Not so much in game terms.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

It's not a problem per se, IMO, but indicative of the current limitations of the simulation/game. More realistic? Eh, insofar that it happened in history, yes. Not so much in game terms.
Yeah, it seems like it's a factor of "we don't know how to model this using our game systems"/"we don't know why exactly it happened this way".

[Gnoman]

It often seems to be a case of "We need to build the game around player experience, but duplicating this particular event in history would require a lot of kludgy work that will badly impact that experience, so we'll just write it in as a special case."

[MonkeySage]

Makes sense... I'm finding sometimes even in tabletop that it can be hard to make some things happen without bending the rules just a little bit.

I noticed it in Dragon Ball Xenoverse, too. Without having Beerus autoblock, and generally cheat, he's no different from any other character. Even a low level character can beat him. To create the same feeling provided by Battle of the Gods, they have to bend their own rules. I used to complain that the Dragon Ball games did a poor job of simulating the huge power differences between, for example, a super saiyan and a normal saiyan. With Xenoverse I concluded that it was just a limitation of the game.
(Note: I'm not saying that the "cheating" makes dragon ball more realistic... which kinda goes against the title of this thread, here, lol)

[Crow]

Well with CKII, the way William the Bastard did the whole thing in real life is closer to the adventurer mechanic included in the game than anything. He didn't raise the majority of his troops from Normandy. He basically put out a call to arms, saying "Come with me on this speculative venture, and if we win, you will be part of the new nobility of England. His claim to the throne came from a method outside of CKII mechanics though. WtB's claim came because he said Edward the Confessor had promised the throne to him; and Harold had claimed he would support him (which of course he didn't).

Bear in mind, this is a simplified explanation.

[Cikomyr]

I cheated at cards a lot in Red Dead Redemption