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A word on cheating
As some of you know, I have been researching a program to stop cheat'o'matic. For those of you who have never heard of it, It was a program written about half a decade ago meant for individuals to cheat in shoot 'em up games. There is also on the net the codes that can be used to cheat your gold in Civ II MPG. This is all fairly common knowledge and can easily be caught saving every turn. Or can it?
The program can change any variable you can get the hex address for. This makes it possible to create/remove city improvments. Get 1-5 new techs every turn, resurrect dead units or settlers who turned into cities, change barbs to your units, modify any cities amount of food and/or shields. The problem here is not only can someone beef themselves up, but they can also set someone else up. Someone else can give your cities granaries, save it, and turn it in as you cheated when they were the ones who did it. There is no way to check the IP traffic to determine who in the game is cheating. So the solution then is just duels, right? Wrong.
Another, probably more common cheat involves those lucky people with two computers. They can load the game on the second computer and reveal the entire map. Civ passwords can be erased easily, and then not only do they know where you are, they know where every hut is. How do you catch this? You can't.
All the bugs and glitches in the game are minor things compared to these two forms of cheating. I honestly do not know what can be done about it. It is possible to write a program that monitors values for wild changes, but not to catch a subtle cheater. There is no way to catch a two computer user. Should there be a program that will show the map so everyone gets that knowledge? Should there be a limit on the number of huts you can open and in what year you can start war? Personally, I believe these are serious concerns and something needs to be done. Now SMAC locks up if you try to cheat with anything but money, and even then it locks half the time. Will Civ3 be cheat proof? I hope they spend the time to do so, but what does everyone reccommend we do now to curb/stop the cheating and make GameLeague as fun as it should be?
Sentient AI
The program can change any variable you can get the hex address for. This makes it possible to create/remove city improvments. Get 1-5 new techs every turn, resurrect dead units or settlers who turned into cities, change barbs to your units, modify any cities amount of food and/or shields. The problem here is not only can someone beef themselves up, but they can also set someone else up. Someone else can give your cities granaries, save it, and turn it in as you cheated when they were the ones who did it. There is no way to check the IP traffic to determine who in the game is cheating. So the solution then is just duels, right? Wrong.
Another, probably more common cheat involves those lucky people with two computers. They can load the game on the second computer and reveal the entire map. Civ passwords can be erased easily, and then not only do they know where you are, they know where every hut is. How do you catch this? You can't.
All the bugs and glitches in the game are minor things compared to these two forms of cheating. I honestly do not know what can be done about it. It is possible to write a program that monitors values for wild changes, but not to catch a subtle cheater. There is no way to catch a two computer user. Should there be a program that will show the map so everyone gets that knowledge? Should there be a limit on the number of huts you can open and in what year you can start war? Personally, I believe these are serious concerns and something needs to be done. Now SMAC locks up if you try to cheat with anything but money, and even then it locks half the time. Will Civ3 be cheat proof? I hope they spend the time to do so, but what does everyone reccommend we do now to curb/stop the cheating and make GameLeague as fun as it should be?
Sentient AI
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