AC is the worst game ever:Article inside

[Kataphraktoi]

now that you have opened and are reading this,lets talk about custom facs and multiplayer

the other day i was editing the PKs and wanted to give them free recycling tanks(dont ask..) and tried ''facility, 1'' and found out this is headquarters.every base gets a headquarters.no efficancy,1+ energy,cant be bribed

this made me think about what if someone edited this into there faction and played a multiplayer game with it,assuming the game checks YOUR faction .txt file for your benifits.(i havnt played multiplayer yet,sadly,so i dont know)

is this possible or does the game check the .txt file the host has for every faction? what if the host gives everyone -5 police etc

assuming this made sense to you guys,is this impossible or do i have to be worried about playing MP games with -5 everything?

[Mr. President]

Cheap trick!

Actually, I don't really play multiplayer, so I couldn't say whether that's possible or not. Sounds frightening, though.

[Kataphraktoi]

being pretty much unheard of here,and wanting someone else besides myself to read this(well,i always tend to ignore unheard of peoples posts ) i decided to use the most provoking title possible in a AC forum

[Mongoose]

I wouldn't be surprised if that juvenile stunt ended up putting you on more members' ignore list than it elicited responses.

(Now comes jt, telling me to chill.)

[Kataphraktoi]

if i get put on someones ignore list for this,i probably wouldnt want to talk to them either

[Blake]

I suspect that a topic like Cheating in Multiplayer would have also got people to read the topic, maybe even reply with something on topic, rather than just commenting about poor choice of tatic to get people to read topic....

Um, I'm not terribly qualified to comment about cheating using modified factions anyway...

[Capt Dizle]

Mongoose! Chill man!

We have to be nice to newts, even ugly ones. Otherwise, 10 years from now who will be our MP victims?

[big_canuk]

Next time try a proper title. I saw the post and ignored it for a while. When I had nothing else to do, and wanted entertainment, I returned to it. Had I known you wanted help, I would have answered sooner. If I wanted to be juvinile as well(M, B and JT ), I would now say, ok, I'll answer you tommorow. But I won't.

I'm not an expert in this area. But, i believe I have read that the files in question get loaded with the sav file when the game begins. Altering the files after the game commences has no effect. I could be wrong, and this may only be some things, but not all. I certainly hope not.

In any case, there are so many opportunities to cheat in MP, that it is pointless to try to eliminate, or police them. I play for fun, and would rather loose honourably, than win by cheating. I play with people who I hope feel the same way. Even if a personal sense of honour and fair play were absent, why would anyone risk being caught cheating. You would deny yourself the pleasure of being welcome in this fine community.

[Capt Dizle]

Hmm, I am feeling vaguely insulted. Fact is b_c popped off a good answer.

I would add to this but I am trying to reduce my personal contribution to the spam content of this site. Especially since MarkG whacked me with a 10% PCR today.

You know, I don't think MarkG looks in here.

@ MarkG

[big_canuk]

Sorry JT, no insult intended. Just a little ribbing at all of our "juvenile" side. As I said, my juvenile side almost made me wait till tommorrow to answer. I just barely overcame it. What helped me get over the hurdle was the opportunity to rib you.

bc

[knowhow2]

cheating usually have th effect of making people repugnant to you when caught.

[Kataphraktoi]

knowhow,im not asking ''does cheating make you look good'' im asking ''is this possible''

[MariOne]

I considered the issue and posted long time ago, only wondering what if.
I then always refused to check, on a dont wanna know basis...

1st, I'd highlight that factions.txt files are read ("loaded") when setting up the game and then embedded in the sav file.

But then, I'd point out that there are also *other* files containing game parameters: I'm referring to the all-famous alpha.txt.
Some of the settings inside there are also read only once, like world-builder parameters.
But I know for SURE that there is at least ONE setting which is read every time you start a session:
the pbem/ip human-commlink visibility flags.
You can save a pbem turn halfway, toggle that flag, and voilà the human commlink which before you could all see are now hidden for the players you don't have truly contacted yet.

So, THAT setting is NOT embdeed in the sav file.
What about the techs/facilities/units attributes tables, with prerequisites, costs, restrictions...?
What about the #RULES section, you could alter the 10 mineral limit halfway your game, the road movement factor, the arty bonus...
Above all, some parameters, like combat ones, influence something that happens during the turn, not something coming in effect when you'll load the next.
In those cases, you could rig the file, perform action with altered settings, reset the setting to pristine value.
Unspottable, except for suspicion if you get atreak of lucky occurrences...

I don't wanna know...

[Capt Dizle]

Well, the cheater mentality does not seem to be as much in evidence in PBEM gaming as it is in direct internet play. Cheating is the expression of desire for instant gratification; instant gratification is not a staple of PBEM. Thus a relatively low rate of cheating is likely.

That being said, what MariOne said above would have been better left unsaid, IMHO.

Its matters little though at the end of the day. We have, for example, the reload messages which can be generated through innocent means. We rountinely ignore these, we must if we are to play at all, but they offer the cheater ample opportunity to do his work.

I do not even agree with MariOne that faction.txt is properly embedded. This was a design flaw and I wonder if Firaxis will get this right on their current project, Civ3.

[johndmuller]

Well if nothing else is clear, I think it is safe to say that some things are imbedded in the game and some aren't .

The Alpha Centauri.ini file is definitely read in each time you start the program and at least some of the contents are acted upon. I believe it is established that at least some of the "Preferences" are ignored/overwritten in PBEM - I don't know what is in the "Rules" parameter, so I have no idea if they are changeable in there.

I would hope that nothing important is settable in this fashion as the .ini file is seemingly designed with personal or hardware specific stuff in mind and is not (at least not completely or even very much) changed when reading in a game; moreover, there are people who load in saved versions of the AC.ini file mostly to assure that the faction colors/graphics are correct in SMAX and who could then be inadvertently distorting other factors.

That said, at least some of the preferences seem to be adjustable outside my own settings somehow as it frequently occurs in PBEM that certain preferences become reset to settings I never prefer and things that I do prefer become unset between turns. I never know for sure whether I am having a battle of wills with another player or the game, but I would guess at least in some cases it is another player as some of the settings seem to only sometimes get changed.

Fortunately for my piece of mind, I don't know any surefire way of cheating except having multiple machines (avoiding reload detection) and while I'm sure that a lot of us have that capability one way or another, it doesn't seem that it would be worth the trouble for any but the most seriously _____ people to use that cheat much, if at all.