Another cheap exploit (trade)

[sunshine]

Howdy y'all,

Found another lame ai exploit tonight and haven't seen anything posted about it, so I thought I would share it here. It's about as ethical as the million dollar bug, but takes advantage of the poorly implemented trade system.

Basically, if you have two or more of any resource (strategic or luxury items) you can get as much gold and as many techs as you want from the ai, as many times per turn as you have worker to build roads and units to destroy them. Fun, huh?

Station a bunch of workers on each resource (4 each should be enough for one round per turn). Add one military unit. When the turn starts, you will have a city with 2 resources and no roads. Build roads on each of the resources, then contact an ai and ask for a tech or gold in exchange for the resource. He will usually respond positively as long as you haven't attacked anybody. Then destroy the roads- poof- resource agreement is dissolved but you keep the tech and the gold.

Rebuild the roads, lather rinse repeat. As often as you want, even with the same ai civ in the same turn. This should make beating the game trivial, since it works on all levels and doesn't even require conquering a civ. Just get a little bit lucky with the resource placement, build a harbor, and fraud your way to world domination.

Sigh. You'd think with as much money as sid and such have made from these games, they would be able to hire a few competent people to test for these things... stuff like this shouldn't have made it through brainstorming, much less beta testing etc.

shiny

[yin26]

But you forget: We *are* beta testing!

[RTodd]

I noticed something similar, but not in regards to trade. I had roads built to resource rubber. During one war, the Aztecs came in and wiped out most of my infrastructure, including the road to rubber. However, I was still able to generate infantry, even though I no longer had access to that resource (it was the only rubber in my country). The manual states you need a road (or harbor or airport) to access resources, but shouldn't access go away if the corresponding route is destroyed?

T

[Hans2]

Um, or maybe its that this is a stupid thing to do and it didn't occur to them that someone would try it, just like the million dollar bug. You can't anticipate every loophole, but now that they know about it, they'll probably fix it.

I have an idea, how about you just not do this, since normaly there's absolutely no reason for you to do it anyway. Avoiding using this 'cheat' and ruining your game seems really simple to me. I geuss what I'm saying is I don't understand how this is such a big deal, or why your so dissapointed they failed to 'catch it' before release.

[Capt Dizle]

yin who else but you would be first to respond to this thread...nice catch sunshine....

[yin26]

Yes, but the real point is: I haven't started any like this, eh?

[Pyrodrew]

I noticed something similar, but not in regards to trade. I had roads built to resource rubber. During one war, the Aztecs came in and wiped out most of my infrastructure, including the road to rubber. However, I was still able to generate infantry, even though I no longer had access to that resource (it was the only rubber in my country). The manual states you need a road (or harbor or airport) to access resources, but shouldn't access go away if the corresponding route is destroyed?

From my experience only the current unit you are working on will be able to be finished. You will not be able to continue making additional units of that type once that 1 is completed. And IMO that works fine. At 1st you got the iron & made the weapon, the time it takes to complete is simply training that unit. When that unit is done, you have no iron & will not be able to make additional units of that type.

[Venger]

Three card monte...

Ugh - another cheapy exploit.

You know, the problem with bugs like this and the 1000000 bug isn't that some human player figured them out, but they betray that the underlying system has serious flaws - and that we may not always see them as vividly as this. If the AI trade engine is so broken that it'll give me (Dr. Evil voice) ONE MILLION DOLLARS per turn or turn down an exchange of 100 of my gold for 10 of it, what else is it screwing up that you don't see on the surface?

Venger

[RTodd]

I *was* able to make additional units, and the resource *still* showed up as available, even though my only road to it was destroyed.

T

[yin26]

Any chance one of your cities is actually sitting on top of a resource? In which case, it's *very* hard to see.

[RTodd]

I agree with that, yin....but I've shown only one rubber resource in cityview. If a city was sitting on one, would it state two?

I'll fire up a savegame and try and recreate.

T

[yin26]

Yes, it would show 2 prior to the roads being severed. Let us know what you find.

[Pyrodrew]

I *was* able to make additional units, and the resource *still* showed up as available, even though my only road to it was destroyed.

Finishing a current unit in production without a resource is not a bug, but if you were able to make multiple additional units from the same city without that resource then that is a bug.

[sunshine]

Nice insight, Venger. I agree. Hans, I guess I'm just venting the frustration that comes from waiting YEARS for something, and then being grossly disappointed by what seems to be a prehistoric throwback to a ten year old game which barely lives up to the mercantile aspirations of Activision, much less the innovations that came with SMAC and SMACx.

It's the same reaction I would have had if Quake 3 would have reverted to the 2-d Castle Wolfenstein engine- cynicism bred by apparent complacency on the part of people I trusted and respected. I refuse to be satisfied with something so obviously defective, coming from this company. If this had been just another civ knockoff, I would not complain; but this product, coming from Fireaxis, borders on intellectual treason.

That said, I'm gonna fire it up for one last try at a huge map deity win. Cheer for my Immortals...

shiny

[RTodd]

Man I need some sleep....found that I changed that particular requirement in the editor.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.