How do we enforce not playing ahead?

[Donegeal]

What is to keep people from playing ahead?

Example one: one team makes contact with another and establishes an embassy in the capitol. While the sav is with someone else, someone on that team loads the save and spends money to investigate a city, then closes the game and reloads to look at a different city.

Example two: two teams are at war. One team first checks to see if a unit will be sucessful by trying it first before actually using it as a sav.

Example three: Humans make errors. Say a galley was accidently moved to the wrong tile. The sav gets dumped and loaded again so the mistake doesn't happen.

What are we to do?

[asleepathewheel]

There definately is concern of this.

I would hope that, all joking aside, this game would be among friends and wouldnt' devolve into massive cheating. But I'm not sure if there is anything more we can do than just trust and self police the groups.

[jdd2007]

as long as we keep the teams small enough, the honor code will be sufficient.

[Jon Shafer]

It's the same situation with the Civ 3 demo game... we just have to trust that people know what they're doing. If not, they're ruining the fun of the game.

[GodKing]

Trust and Honor.

[Donegeal]

I think the only way the honor system will work is if the ultimate goal of these initial Multiplayer PTW-DGs is to learn what the Multi-site game will be like.

If everyone is out there to win, cheating will happen (its human nature).
If everyone is out there to prepare for the Multi-site game, it won't happen (as much, its human nature).

[mrmitchell]

If there's a teams game first, which there needs to be for practice, then the teams game will be practice for the multisite.

In other words, the only thing to do is hope everyone is honest.

[ruby_maser]

playing ahead

maybe now, or later as the teams start to solidify, we create a thread(s) to have every team or every team member declare that "I will not cheat" and sign on the dotted line.

Granted its a formality in one sense, but it insure that everyone knows the game or reinforces that knowledge. Teams could even go so far as to declare that a team member who was found to have cheated can be removed from the game and that the team will not act on any knowledge accidentally divulged.

In the case of embassies, I think that a formal request should be made to establish one anyway. If one team is wary of another, they should be able to deny them the right to establish one. But this may be above and beyond.

[Aro]

Civilization is this, run against the human nature, sometimes. I trust you, guys, and I hope you trust me.
Call me naïf, if you want...

[slavepaleface]

If your going to cheat, might as well play single player.

Then noone cares.

[Tassadar500]

There is no real way for us to keep people from cheating. So I guess we will have to go with honesty.

[redstar1]

I think we just have to trust the teams themselves to play fair and to stop their members cheating.

[Randolph]

Yes, if someone is dead set of cheating there will be no stopping him/her.

OTOH, it would be nice to have some moderate deterrent just to "keep honest people honest" (not that I have any brilliant ideas about how to do this).

[redstar1]

Well I suppose each team polices their own. Anyone found cheating is either removed from the team or not allowed a position of responsibility. Any team found cheating is removed from the game etc...

[Donegeal]

Perhaps we could get Markg on this. If someone if proven to be cheating, he not only gets removed from the game, but he gets banned from the forums altogether for a period of time determind by Markg. Make the punishment EXCEED the crime.