Epic Six - Sullla's Game

[ThERat]

wow, conquest in 1502AD...something must have been right there...good game Sullla

[Kylearan]

Hi,

I suppose the rationale goes something like this:

Back in Civ3, our second Always War game (Epic 14) featured the Greeks and their 1/3/1 hoplite unique unit. One of the things that came out of that game was the revelation that you could cripple the AI - absolutely CRIPPLE it - by pillaging it into the stone age early and often, then parking units outside the AI cities to ensure that further tile improvements were never constructed.

Pillaging, in my mind, is not exploitative. The AI has even become better at removing any pillage'n'park stacks on critical resources. However, parking an archer at an AI's capital as soon as possible is an exploit.

What is an exploit? It can be intentionally using a bug to one's advantage, like consciously whipping at the sweet spot to maximize the whipping bug. Or it can be exploiting a weakness in the AI's coding on a very basic level. Parking an archer at the capital, the AI's only city, causes its worker to hide in the city forever. It does not realize it could improve tiles on the other side of the city, or improve tiles under cover of other units. In its effect, this is the same as stealing its worker, which we regard as exploitative. It shuts down the AI completely, destroying the game and taking away any challenge (against that AI, at least). It's a situation That Should Not Be, that makes no sense, and taking advantage of this is an exploit like worker baiting in Civ 3, or seed corn. I'm really surprised you don't consider early harassmant to be an exploit.

-Kylearan

[ThERat]

I'd say on higher difficulty levels, any means to make the AW game easier would be allowed. But using units to suppress the enemy are in my mind really 'exploitive'.
It basically removes one enemy here in this game.

[Sullla]

And how exactly is that so different from beelining immediately at the earliest possible opportunity for a Civil Service grab from the Oracle, along with an Academy in the capital, after which your economy is running at roughly 5x the rate of your nearest competitor? The AI has no prayer on attack or defense when you reach maces in 500BC, and it can barely field axes.

Anyway, this is the first Civ4 Always War event at Realms Beyond. We haven't established any kind of precedents as yet. If there's a consensus that players shouldn't be running around in AI territory early on, I'll have no problem sticking to that. For this game though, I was adhering to the MP philosophy that if you can't protect your workers and tile improvements, they will be taken away from you. If we want to put that out of bounds for future events, ok.

This is the third straight game where I've gotten flak on report day over one thing or another. Not blaming anyone over that - I know everyone's intentions are good - but given the time and energy that goes into these reports, I'm not sure how long I'll continue if that keeps happening. Oh well.

I adopted what I thought was about the most conservative gameplan possible for this game, and it's still causing controversy.

[ThERat]

Sullla games are of the highest quality, so we all expect you to win by 500AD without any exploits

I think this game was too kind and allowed players to settle for slingshots etc without using any experience on real AW in CIV, which, frankly can be downright brutal...

[darrelljs]

This is the third straight game where I've gotten flak on report day over one thing or another. Not blaming anyone over that - I know everyone's intentions are good - but given the time and energy that goes into these reports, I'm not sure how long I'll continue if that keeps happening. Oh well.

Ack, don't do that

Seriously. Your reports are bar none the best. You take the time to walk people through your thought process and I've learned more from them than anyone else's. I think the questions over that move DID overshadow the rest of your report and I'm sorry if I contributed to that.

Darrell

[mihau]

It basically removes one enemy here in this game.

So what?
there were 5 other

hmmm.... putting an archer near EVERY opponent AI capital could be fun - maybe there is an SG in it?
- go into world builder, add enemy archers in the all AI's BFC and start a game
- Diety lev. lets say

[mucco]

And how exactly is that so different from beelining immediately at the earliest possible opportunity for a Civil Service grab from the Oracle, along with an Academy in the capital, after which your economy is running at roughly 5x the rate of your nearest competitor? The AI has no prayer on attack or defense when you reach maces in 500BC, and it can barely field axes.

Anyway, this is the first Civ4 Always War event at Realms Beyond. We haven't established any kind of precedents as yet. If there's a consensus that players shouldn't be running around in AI territory early on, I'll have no problem sticking to that. For this game though, I was adhering to the MP philosophy that if you can't protect your workers and tile improvements, they will be taken away from you. If we want to put that out of bounds for future events, ok.

This is the third straight game where I've gotten flak on report day over one thing or another. Not blaming anyone over that - I know everyone's intentions are good - but given the time and energy that goes into these reports, I'm not sure how long I'll continue if that keeps happening. Oh well.

I adopted what I thought was about the most conservative gameplan possible for this game, and it's still causing controversy.

NOOOOO :insert terrified smiley here: you can't speak seriously! Losing your reports would be horrible, especially for those (like me) who got to know cIV with your walkthrough. They're always so detailed that there will be many points to discuss, even if many others have played the same way you did (in this case, I did the same thing, except that my archer was killed ). The discussion appears on the threads of the best players and reporters because these are the reports that draw the most attention, plus here anyone can have very complete and reasonable answers.

Personally, I don't think that was an exploit - because my archer was killed, of course, but nevertheless you have to take advantage of AI's errors, and you do it every turn, when you want to win the game. Else, placing few units in your core cities moving the most to the border would also be an exploit - if you know that no AI will never pose a serious threat with anphibious attacks. Going for Polytheism for a religion would also be an exploit, because you know AIs always go for meditation. In my opinion an exploit happens when somebody uses a flaw in the programming that completely changes the gameplay - see Moonsinger's praetorian tactic posted at civfanatics. Placing an unit near an enemy city for "scouting purposes" (that was my intention) is not an exploit, as the AI is still free to build some more soldiers and kill your sentry.

Kylearan is right when he says it's an exploit to abuse a bug in the programming. The only problem is to draw a line that separates a "weakness" from a "bug" of the AI. In this case, I'd call the AI error a "weakness", because maybe it couldn't protect his worker, nor send him somewhere else, but he could counterattack, that's for sure :mad:.

Just my two *humble* cents .

[Sullla]

mucco, darrelljs, don't worry. If you put yourself forward in any kind of public setting, people are always going to question you. The folks at Realms Beyond are especially nice and friendly about doing so. I will post some irritated things at times out of frustration, but I don't anticipate pulling reports any time soon.

Everyone has the right to criticize as they see fit.

[Gogf]

As someone who plays predominantly multiplayer, I don't have any issue with choking. Because Civ4 is often a defensively oriented game, choking is a very powerful and very popular strategy.

As with any part of the game, humans are smarter than the AI when it comes to choking. You can shut down the AI with a single archer on a forest hill next to their capital; they'll just keep attacking and losing to it. In multiplayer, however, a single unit is not enough to choke a good player, but three units may be. You're exporting a viable multiplayer strategy which is hardly considered exploitative to single player, and, because of the incompetence of the AI, it takes two less units to do it.

Ideally the AI would respond better to being choked. It would escort its worker and improve the tiles around its city. It would just ignore the "choker" (which loses its teeth when all it can do it observe) and kill it later once it has units capable of doing that. In fact, we saw the AI do this in Sullla's game! It did end up sending out a settler/archer/archer group and founding another city.

Great report, Sullla .