Legitimate vs Cheating Strategies

[Capt Dizle]

You have to go the minimalist route. Build a consensus and ban only the worst exploits.

The only two things I can off the top of my head come up with are the money cheat and turn reloading. This would be for comparative SP games.

Multiplayer is going to be a huge problem. Lets say you are in a game with 4 humans and 4 AI. You happen to be the lucky guy that moves immediately after the AI. You then get the first crack at buying new tech from one and selling to the other AI. You then get to see what resources that have suddenly been revealed by the new tech. You get to exploit your position in the movement order. You get to set up MPP and Military Alliances before the others do. This can get messy.

I don't even know the turn order yet. Has anyone got that pegged yet.

I have a headache just thinking about this.

[David Weldon]

I would like to propose another general guideline to point out obvious "cheats". Actually, to remove the semantic argument, let's call them "unfair" or "unsportsmanlike" instead of "cheats":

4) Anything that would never be useable against a human opponent.

Notice the word never, lots of things that would occasionally work are OK. Some "unfair" things won't be covered by this point, but I think it is worth thinking about when evaluating things...

- Trading a tech or selling a city for an unusually high price is OK, all players face the same AI.
-Getting lucky and entering the tech trading cycle first is OK, you got lucky.
-IFE is OK, it would work just as well against humans.
-Blockading with privateers is OK.
-Breaking treaties is of course OK. If they give you RoP, have fun!
-Abandoning and rebuilding cities to eliminate oppression or move your palace is OK, it would work just as well against humans.
-Making AI vassals is OK.

-Selling and re-taking cities _more than once_ is definitely out.
-Doing so the first time if you have a force already built up in view and waiting to take it is probably out.
-Moving privateers along with a BB or some other ship of your own is out, no human would attack them "unknowingly".
-The million dollar bug is out.
-Razing the same city over and over again to stifle AI expansion is out, humans would just expand the other way.

I'm sure there are others, but for the most part I personally don't believe very much that has been posted should be considered "unfair".

[Capt Dizle]

There is so much that will have to be changed. ROP for example. If they leave it as in mixed human and AI games there would have to be a rush to knock out an AI before your opponent. Thats cheesy.

[karlmarx9001]

'That said, I think beating games means finding ways to beat the AI/system of the game. I think IFE is a legit strategy. You can think of it as planting trees and cutting it down for more lumber. Now, putting more workers making the trees grow faster could be problematic, but maybe you can think of it as putting more workers will make more trees grow. Who knows. That I think is not cheating.'

Here's a quick way to figure out if the designers actually wrote the game with IFE in mind: compare its effectiveness to everything else in the game. It takes ten production and one population to build a worker, one gold in upkeep to keep the worker around, ten turns to plant the trees, and ten turns to cut the trees back down for ten production. If you ignore the minimal startup costs, then over the long-term:

Depotism: .5 production per gold.
Monarchy: .5 production per gold.
Communism: .5 production per gold.
Republic: .5 production per gold.
Democracy: 1 production per gold.

In other words, it's four times as effective as wealth, and twice as effective as rush-buying. You can practically play the game focusing just on this; drop zillions of cities all over the map just to get the 4/city or more worker support under depotism/monarchy/communism. Why on earth would they intentionallly do this? Did Sid want to lure everyone into coming down with carpal tunnel syndrome?

Myself, I refuse to do it, as it seems ludicrous, kind of like individually checking every city you have every single turn. Sure, it may help you "win", but it sounds more tedious than fun. Chopping down trees that are already there is much less offensive to my sensibilities; it's a small bonus that actually has a downside (for areas with no 2 production squares) early in the game. If I have to do it all goddamn game, why not let me individually tell the workers in factories what to do? Or push the farmers across the rows of wheat, clicking once for each swing of the scythe? ;0

If this is what it takes to win on Diety, I'll stick to the lower difficulty levels. It reminds me of supply crawlers in SMAC, except there's even more busywork.

[CB2034]

My old basketball coach in highschool once told me

"Its not cheating if you dont get caught"

I dont cheat but I just thought i would throw that in

[Elowan]

The entire issue of Cheat/Exploit is disingenuous.

You bought the game. If you're having fun -- go for it!

[David Weldon]

jimmy:
RoP is a tough one, but I think it's OK to use it to your advantage. The reason is that there's a built-in penalty for exploiting it: no other AI will ever sign RoP with you, and it takes you one step closer to not being able to ever trade anything per turn to the AI. Also, just because you took out an AI first, another player can still sign RoP and also take out an AI. Maybe you think the penalty isn't stiff enough, but that's an issue you have with the game design, not an issue of fairness. This might be a personal taste thing, whether you want a lot of early wars or not, but I don't believe it should be considered "unfair". (oh, and I don't do this in my own games, just fyi)

Elowan:
You and the others who have posted similar sentiments are simply wrong. No one in this thread is trying to force you to play like "we" want you to. We are trying to establish a set of rules so that people can compare game results fairly, and so that future MP games aren't played differently by different players (in the same game). That is not at all disingenuous, nor is it a waste of time. A great example is the Apolyton tournament game. If there was a way to prevent anyone from save/reloading, then the results would be much more reliable. Of course other exploits are also available, and that's what we're trying to discuss.

One more time for the cheap seats:

Of course you can play the game and have fun any way in which you'd like. Use the editor as well as any exploits you feel comfortable with to your hearts' content.

There's no reason to keep posting this idea over and over on this thread.

The point, as someone already wrote, is that if you're going to brag or compare game tactics, scores, or results, then you should be playing the same game everyone else is playing, and that means the editor and certain "unfair" techniques should not be used.

[LotC]

Confessions of a chronic reloader

I think this falls in the realm of "playing the game the way you like to".

I'm on my second full game now and, like the first full one I played, I find myself doing quite a bit of reloading...ESPECIALLY at the start of the game. At the start of my current game, I reloaded a good 7 times before I placed my first city in the best spot I could find. The 6 turn of auto-saves allows me to go back and correct mistakes I made recently, but after midway through the Ancient Age does not allow for a complete reworking of my strategy. I'm only in the habit of manually saving before major undertakings (ie. war) so reverting to a previous manual save can let me take a different tack in my strategy.

For example, in my current game I'm making a grab for the whole world's oil resources (all of which are reasonably close to me). Having no supply of rubber, and with France having rubber nearby and holding a couple of the oil tiles, I thought I'd try a short war to take the oil and rubber while waging war on Germany, the Iriquois (weak), and the Russians (decimated by me in the early game), all of which held the oil tiles.

Well, my infantry and cavalry weren't quite up to the task of defeating the French infantry so I thought I'd go back to 1 turn pre-war and try it again, this time buying rubber from the Americans for 1000 gold and getting some tanks. Now I control all but 1 oil tile (the Iriquois will be losing that shortly).

So am I having fun playing this way? YOU BET!! I love going back and seeing how things could have been different by trying a different strat. It could be that I'm still actually playtesting and that I will, in time, reload less, but for now I'm having a great time playing this way. However, some people might consider this blatant cheating.

So my point is, the only way you can cheat in SP is by making the game less fun for yourself. You have no problem with getting 9999999 gold? You still have fun playing when you do it? Are you having fun micromanaging 30 workers every turn on IFE? Then by all means do it. If it's no fun for you to do these things then you most likely won't.

[vmxa1]

I am not sure why this IFE is raised in this issue as I see near universal acceptance of it.
Your old coach is amoral or ignorant, I would lean toward ignorant as he/she was paid to teach children. Cheating or stealing is wrong even if you are not caught. Think about the times you were cheated or had someting stolen from you. We are not debating that point, we are talking about what constitutes cheating in Civ3.

[Barchan]

You know, this whole IFE business reminds me of a loophole/bug in CivI. If you told a worker to irrigate, for example, and then clicked on it, you could order it to irrigate again. You could repeat this process until the worker had completed the task, all in the same turn.

I guess you could legitimize it by saying "well, I just stood by him and inspired him to work faster with my persistent leadership" (insert image of Montgomery Burns: "You call that irrigation!?! Dig faster! Yeees, that's it!). But still, it always seemed like I was doing something that just wasn't originally intended to be done.

I see IFE the same way. Oh, sure, it's not illegal, because the game lets you do it. But in the same way that the designers didn't intend for people, via the magic of micromanagement, to make workers do in one turn what should take eight in CivI, I don't think the designers intended for people to increase the shield production of a city via IFE in CivIII.

Yes, I know corruption is cripplingly high. And, admittedly, IFE is a creative way around the problem. But so is editing the game to eliminate corruption completely. Sure, you can do these things, but at what point do you modify the game so much that you are no longer playing CivIII? After all, if you can pick up the soccer ball and run with it, you’re not playing soccer anymore, you’re playing rugby (more or less…).

Lastly, I agree with everyone who has said that it’s inappropriate to fiddle with the rules to make the game easier to play according to your own personal style and then, after having thoroughly crushed the AI, come a-runnin’ to the message boards to crow about how frightfully clever you are in that you beat the AI on “deity” by 2050 BC. There’s a difference between modifying the game to make it more fun and changing it to make it easier to claim bragging rights. If you don’t understand the difference, well, perhaps you should work on that little self-esteem problem you undoubtedly have….

[MarshalN]

I think the easy fix for IFE is to make forest grow the same no matter how many workers there are. Then I think it's very realistic and can be used -- you chop them down, you plant them, you chop them down again, sort of like a tree farm. I don't think anybody will have problems with that. Problem right now is just that with 4 or 5 workers the trees grow much faster.... which can seem silly to some people.

Not that I ever use IFE. It's too much of a pain to do that stuff. I hate micromanaging to that point.

[vmxa1]

I do not use it either as it is too much trouble. One thing I hate is the late part o the game when you may have 100 workers and it takes a fairly long time to have their turn. I capture 3 or more in every city I take. I often send them some where to be disband, just to keep the game moving. I was watching the AI send 8-20 workers to the same area and it is painful.

[David Weldon]

I'm all for Marshal's idea of having the forests grow at a set rate without being able to be hurried. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if that's really in the cards, as it would probably mean Firaxis would have to treat 'plant forest' very differently than any of the other worker jobs. In any case, it's a good idea.

However, I'm personally not convinced that IFE is all that powerful. There _is_ a startup cost (the workers), and a continuing cost (the upkeep of the workers or else the unit spot that the workers take up), and with pop-rushing or money-rushing as alternatives I would not be afraid of playing someone who used IFE mercilessly. Perhaps this is only because I haven't perfected it myself, but I just don't think it breaks the game in any way whatsoever. So I say: let 'em do it!

I did find another "cheat", however:

- Using workers as bait to draw out AI attacking forces so you can crush them in a counter attack is out.

- Using a wall of workers to try and prevent attacking units from getting at the "good stuff" by using up their attack is OK. If you want to sac that many workers, I'll walk slowly along and soak them up.

The difference here is whether or not you are counting on an AI fanning out to take all the workers while ignoring your forces and ending up vulnerable, or if you're just trying to absorb a few attacks before the AI or (future) human goes to work on your forces.

[eMarkM]

Lastly, I agree with everyone who has said that it’s inappropriate to fiddle with the rules to make the game easier to play according to your own personal style and then, after having thoroughly crushed the AI, come a-runnin’ to the message boards to crow about how frightfully clever you are in that you beat the AI on “deity” by 2050 BC.

What, you mean it's wrong to modify my Jaguar Warrior and give it 100.100.100? Man, I love discovering and conquering the whole map in a couple of turns!

e

[G.A]

Everyone forgot one more thing, which everyone probably is using, but which is definitely a cheat - Palace trick!

I mean building something only to switch to another thing when you have the ability... Hehe, though how else would I possibly build a wonder before AI does?

But from the above made points this one falls under "absurd" category - switching half way from Lighthouse to Sistine Chapel etc...