No palace corruption bug (exploit)

[Aeson]

Over at CivFanatics, wizlock stumbled onto this while playing the GOTM. If you conquer a city while you have no cities of your own, you have your first city without a palace. Then all other cities which are built will have NO corruption at all. The way wizlock did it was to explore with the settler, and hope for a hut that gives a warrior. This works more consistantly if you first build a city, produce a couple of military units, and then disband the city by building a settler before your units take their first city. The drawbacks are that it takes a bit of time (about 20 turns) before your empire gets started, and without a palace it isn't possible to trade resources. Still, on anything other than an early conquest game, this can be very powerful.

[philler]

and then disband the city by building a settler

I don't remember that being possible...

I think the building of the settler is postponed till the city reaches size 3.

I could be wrong.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by philler


I don't remember that being possible...

I think the building of the settler is postponed till the city reaches size 3.

I could be wrong.

It works if you reassign the workers so that there is a food deficit. If the city is 2 pop and it produces less than 4 food, you will get a message asking if you want to abandon the city. Say yes, poof, city gone.

Very strange exploit. Trying to anticipate player behavior must be like herding cats for Soren and the rest of the team.

Next patch... GONE.

Salve

[Grrr]

Originally posted by philler


I don't remember that being possible...

I think the building of the settler is postponed till the city reaches size 3.

I could be wrong.

You are WRONG!

[Aeson]

Aye, its something that needs to be fixed, thats why I posted it here, hoping it would catch some attention. I can see how it was missed, as it isn't anywhere in the neighborhood of "sound" strategy to send your first settler and worker around popping huts while the AI builds up.

And disbanding the city does work if you are at population 2 and producing 4 food as well (can be even or deficit). On lower difficulty levels (cheiftain, maybe warlord?) I think it is possible to do at 1, as at 2 settlers are still produced normally.

[DickK]

I agree, its easy to see why it would get missed but it really shouldn't have been.

Variations on this gambit have been around for long time. Best example is with one of Brian's early games for MPS, Colonization. I'm sure I'm not the first or only one who discovered it, but after the game had been out for awhile I found that the best starting strategy was to not build any colonies your own but rather use your initial military unit to capture an AI colony. The AI would 100% of the time send new (equivalent of) settlers right back to the same area which you could again capture. Eventually it went elsewhere but in the meantime you could build up an insurmountable advantage. Later when I had the opportunity, I told Brian about it and he commented that in all the playtesting they'd done no one had thought to try that exploit.

The developers will never catch all the exploits that we'll come up with but the more playtesting, the more get caught.

[barefootbadass]

One question about this exploit, can you build your own cities after you cap an ai city?

Anyway the simple solution(it seems to me) would be to make you have communist like corruption if you don't have a palace and also fix it such that ANY time you don't have a palace and build one of your own cities, it gets a palace and your corruption reverts to whatever you should have with your government type.

[Skeletal Dragon]

I can see serious exploits with this:

In mid game ot late game, build a small army, massive workers and draft a lot of units to bring down your city size quickly. Then disband all your cities. Storm one of your enemy's cities and capture it, then resettle and put the workers back into the cities. No city improvements though, but you still get cities with no corruption.

Firaxis, please fix this before MP comes out!!

[Aeson]

Yes, you can more cities after capturing the first from the AI, no corruption for any of them. It's not a terribly big concern, as in most cases you would have to *try* to reproduce it. It could screw up valid games in some situations though. If in an early war with the AI, somehow all your early cities are destroyed, while you have an active settler, your armies in return might capture an AI city before you found your first. Over at CivFanatics, wizlock stumbled into this while playing the GOTM, which has a very strict honor code against exploits and reloading/restarting. Because of this his game probably isn't going to count (he agrees it shouldn't), so in such a case it really can be a problem.

I would imagine that this occurs because the code to check for a palace is actually code that just checks for a prior city. When taking over a city, there is no check for a palace or prior city. Once a settler builds a city, the code see's the AI city that was captured, and assumes that is the capitol. If the code were just changed to check on whether there actually was a palace or not whenever a city is aquired (through settlement or conquest), it would fix this. The AI city that was captured would become the capitol when it was conquered.

Your solution would also work, though it might leave an opening for allowing the AI to build all cities, and just capture them. Because there would still be no palace, the corruption due to distance from the palace would still be non-existant. Whether or not this would be enough of an advantage to make people want to try it or not, I don't know.

It would be interesting to know if the AI can also do this. There are times when they have their last city taken out, and with a settler still active, continue to be in the game. If they could take over a city at that time, this bug could also work in their favor. Of course they usually seem to build their own city at first chance, but in the cases of the settler being on a boat, that can take a couple of turns. Also there is a bug where the last settler on a boat is never used to build a city, and could make this more likely.

[Aeson]

I agree Skeletal, it could be very imbalancing in certain multiplayer situations. If an opponent (or AI, if they are also included in multiplayer) were close to being taken out, purposely disbanding of cities into settlers/workers would be quite viable if no other opponents posed a threat at the time. This could be because 2 of you started on your own continent, or your standing army was large enough to defend itself until the rebuilding would occur. It would certainly give a huge advantage later in the game in either of these scenarios, even given the lack of production while it was being set up.

[barefootbadass]

Originally posted by Skeletal Dragon
In mid game ot late game, build a small army, massive workers and draft a lot of units to bring down your city size quickly. Then disband all your cities. Storm one of your enemy's cities and capture it, then resettle and put the workers back into the cities. No city improvements though, but you still get cities with no corruption.

Firaxis, please fix this before MP comes out!!

Well, you'd take a major culture drop doing that, might make things hard with defection.

As far as MP goes I don't think it will be viable at all(might work if lucky but if it doesn't you lose right then) since you can't reload if it doesn't work. Unless despot rush is nerfed that will probably be the rule.