Have we been cheating?

[Thrumble]

In the Who Has The Game Save thread the following issue was brought up:

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Dejon: If you save a PBEM game and reload it, you get another turn of production. This is another bug that has to be fixed. So while keeping a pre-end save for the records is ok, you under no circumstances should reload such a save again and send it as turn. That would be another possible cheat.

And later:

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
It is true, trust me. Nathan reported it, in our Minitourney PBEM. He got it balanced out again by intentionally reducing his food/production/commerce the next turns. Only culture he couldn't balance out, he compensated this with gold. After this I tested it in one of my running PBEMs (not that I have sent the save...) and saw that it's indeed the case.

As for an apology to Eli: I already said in the other thread, he loaded a MP game in SP mode, no more and no less, despite the widely known problems. That is at least careless. If it was done intentionally, it would be cheating, but nobody blamed Eli to have done it by purpose. What is really in order is not an apology, but a codex how to load and care about the savegame.

I tried this out and it does in fact happen. No warning or difference other than if you look at your cities they are all one turn closer in their production, you are one turn of tax revenue richer, and your workers are one turn closer to completing you jobs.

We currently have a cloud over our heads in that we have hinted to the world that we have been cheating. In my opionion we need to go through and calculate our turn production to see if it has occured and by how much.

I would like to have a truthful answer here or I will quit this team and renounce my membership and reasons in the public forum.

Have we saved the game mid-turn and reloaded it before sending to the next team? Everytime that is done we steal a free turn of production.

I sincerely hope this is not the case, but if it is we need to access the damage and somehow make ammends. I want no part in a dishonest victory or play style.

[jdjdjd]

If we have, it was in error. Other civs may have made the same error. Why we would assume such a bug existed?

Now that we know about it, we can avoid.

There is no reason, in my mind, that the international community needs to be involved. If we made that mistake, then we do not make it again.

[Thrumble]

Apparently Dejon has posted in the Main Forum that we haven't done this.

I have seen nothing in our forum addressing it however, and the posts in the Main Forum insinuate that we had discussed it. Did I miss this discussion?

Originally posted by jdjdjd
If we have, it was in error. Other civs may have made the same error. Why we would assume such a bug existed?

Now that we know about it, we can avoid.

There is no reason, in my mind, that the international community needs to be involved. If we made that mistake, then we do not make it again.

I'm not saying we knowingly cheated. But if we have gotten free turns from it I should think we would try to level back the playing field.

Even if we convince the other teams we have not cheated and determine that we did as you have stated, I would not feel comfortable continuing to play the game knowing that we had cheated in the beginning (even though it was a mistake).

[Hot Mustard]

Thrumble:

There haven't been any threads dedicated to it in here, but the existence of the bug has been brought up a couple of times in recent turn threads and chats.

I am the only one who has been making "Pre-end" saves, and for the record, I have never re-loaded one of these saves, continued the turn, and sent it on. It goes without saying that to do so would be cheating, and like yourself, I would want nothing to do with a cheating team.

If it will further assure your sense of honour, we can ask Arnelos and Togas for similar statements, as they are the only others who have played and sent turns.

[E_T]

It's one of those things that everyone assumes that everyone knows about.

As for the possibility of the poeple who have played the game for our team, I have no doubt that they have NOT done any cheating with our part of the save. I have worked closely with most of them for several months in the SPDG and I have no such worries that they would do such a thing. Doing a Save & reload & repeat would be akin to playing ahead in the SPDG, which is one of the most gaurded Rules in that game.

As for IF we have done it, that is not possible. With as much discussion & analizing that we have been doing in this forum, we would Immediately have noticed that something was very wrong, i.e. off by a turn or more from our expectations.

So Thrumble, do not worry. As for the collected Integrity of this group, I can vouch for a fair number of them and we are a stronger team because of it.

E_T

[Togas]

I discovered this bug last week after opening the mid-turn save so that I could redo some screenshots I made. I posted about it and also reported this bug to Infogrames, and I imagine I was not the first.

I have never started playing a turn, saved it, and then reloaded it. None of us would have reason to. Funny thing is, I recall poor Arnelos trying to plan for Madrid's growth using a mid-turn save that was sent to him and being confused why it didn't grow as fast as he had planned for. We're going to have to rely on only screenshots for our city planning until a patch is released to fix this.

--Togas

[E_T]

Or they can just use the Original save that was sent from GoW. As long as they don't do anything but look at the tiles & play with the WF, it would be o.k. with me.

E_T

[GodKing]

What a pain in the arse. I never heard of this bug before.

[Arnelos]

As I just posted in the public forums.... yes, it's a known bug.

I ran into it when I was loading that mid-turn save that Togas sent me (as he remarks above). The way it works is that you only see something you're not supposed to if you RE-LOAD a save that you've already loaded during that session of Civ3 running or load a mid-turn save.

To avoid the bug, you have to load a save from the start of the turn and it has to be the first time you've loaded a save while Civ3 was running.

That means that if you're working our turn and you realize you made a mistake and want to do it over or soemthing like that, you have to EXIT THE GAME before reloading the save you were sent by the previous team in order to avoid seeing stuff you shouldn't see.

I started doing that after I realized what was going on and looked at the bugs forums and stuff. The only thing I saw on that turn where I accidentally called up the save was GoW's starting position (which we already know) and Vox's starting position (though not on the mini-map, so I closed it before I could see where exactly they were situated).

So as much as I'm tempted to look at it to find out where Gathering Storm is (since that's the only team with an unknown location), I am determined that we should not cheat (and I trust that the other teams are just as determined).

[Thrumble]

Originally posted by GodKing
What a pain in the arse. I never heard of this bug before.

Me either. All right, fine. I don't want to ruffle anyone's feathers, I just haven't been involved with these Democracy games much and it seemed like the issue was being ignored.

All hail the Honorable Spainards and their impeccable nobility!

[OliverFA]

Thrumble:

Asi E_T wisely says, it is impossible for our group to have been taking profit from this bug, because will al the in detail micro-analysis done in this forums, it would have been noticed really quickly. In fact Togas noticed it several days before, and posted it here in the forums. So no reason to worry about.

And about cheating: Well, it is a matter of trust. Sadly there are too much ways of cheating. If someone want to cheat we have no way to preventing it. When we joined the game we admited that we trust in all the other players, otherwise it would be imposible to play.

Too bad that the people at Firaxis left too much security holes in the game. Let's hope they fix them in the next patch...

[E_T]

At least it will be a way for the other teams to agree to uning the next Patch, that is, if it gets fixed.

E_T

[ruby_maser]

[editted];

Scratch that. I was gonna offer a .bix file I created for running scenarios if anyone wanted to make projections, but it was too difficult to get the proper outcome from the goody hut near Madrid and run it accurately through to the founding of Pamplona to make it worth while for everyone to have to go through that.

[DAVOUT]

Before the start of the game, Togas made a statement in the public forum that our team will not cheat. This was implicitely (and formally for most in the preceding discussion) adhered to by the members at that time. I suggest that this statement be reiterated in a specific thread, and that any new member be required to concurred in this statement upon arrival.

[ruby_maser]

Originally posted by DAVOUT
I suggest that this statement be reiterated in a specific thread, and that any new member be required to concurred in this statement upon arrival.

I agree
...since our membership continues to rise even after the game has begun. I am wonder if there is any screening going on at all for new members.