Is this a cheat ? (crawler users only)

[Aredhran]

While certainly not happy about losing a project to another faction, I would say "so be it". After all, I could have done the same thing...

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

I'll join the masses here in saying I don't think of it as a cheat. In fact, many is the time I micromanage galor and in the process of moving a crawler out to the hinterlands will stop at every step along the way and make sure that little puppy brings back some form of resource be it Nuts/mins/or energy.
I'll then have that little crawler resume its march next turn to the more fertile resource areas and if need be repeat the process all the while having to wake the unit back up every turn and repeat adnauseum.

Call me a perfectionist (or a cheater if you prefer) but every little bit helps. (Some day I might be promoted to perfect cheater .)


[This message has been edited by Ogie Oglethorpe (edited June 14, 2000).]

[BustaMike]

Definately not a cheat...

The reason is that the crawler's movement and supply crawling occur at different parts of your turn. The crawler doesn't actually give any resources to the city until the upkeep of your next turn. Movement points have nothing to do with the crawler harvesting resources. I can't see how this is a cheat if the effect doesn't even happen until the next turn. I think it's a waste if the crawler has to wait a whole turn after reaching its destination to receive orders.

I think Ned mentioned above that you can do the same thing with terraformers. This is true, but you don't get any benefit. A terraformer uses it's movement points when it terraforms a square. If it didn't you could get a borehole in one turn by clicking on the former over and over again and giving it orders after its turn is up (you could actually do this in Civ1 from what I've heard, big cheat).

[WhiteElephants]

I suppose theoretically someone could move a crawler over a borehole and finish a special project one turn ahead of me under the circumstances that they had no money, no other units to disband in the Special Project base, no nearby needlejets he could fly in and disband or any other nearby units, and in theory the said Special Project could be the Ascent to Transcendence and therefore I would lose the game because someone else transcended before me, but then you have to ask yourself "Why did he bother crawlering the borehole when he could have just moved the crawler into the base and cashed it in for the project?" Or maybe theoretically the crawler was one space away from the borehole and two spaces away from the base and there were no roads, or magtubes for that matter, and in that case (assuming the said crawler was on a infantry chassis and not a rover or hovertank chassis) I still would not believe it was a cheat and would bow down to the utter resourcefulness or my obviously superior opponent.

[Googlie]

The weight of opinion is that it is not a cheat.

Moreover, the official little guidebook that came packed with the game says (page 95)..

A unit that has already exhausted all its movement points can still be activateed .... and given orders that don't involve further movement in the current turn

So it is blessed by the game designers themselves.

Phew!!

Googlie

[Drago Sinio]

To me it is not a cheat, as a matter of logic. The crawler is doing the same thing as would an infantry unit at the end of its turn. The infantry unit would guard its square, the crawler will harvest its square. The exhaustion of its movement points is irrelevant, as the units function does not involve movement. Simple.

[LoD]

I agree with the majority here that this is not a cheat. Morever, I tend to do the same thing Ogie does - harvesting resources each turn (when possible) while en-route.

LoD

[YT]

I give in in the face of overwhelming opinion and a quote from the rules (good find Brother Googlie).

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Yours Truly

[Basil]

I've been getting gradually stricter with myself about this, in my first games I used crawlers any time the code let me, in my recent games I don't use crawlers that have moved and in future SP games I won't use crawlers that have less than half their movement left. Looking at these posts, I guess I'd better not do that in MP!

[This message has been edited by Basil (edited June 15, 2000).]

[Misotu]

It's clearly not a cheat. Like someone else said, the ability of a crawler to harvest is quite separate from its movement ability.

There are, after all, sufficient obvious cheats in the game due to bugs without inventing some

- Mis