Epic Six - Sullla's Game

[uberfish]

Honestly, I think people should step back from labelling tactics that they personally dislike as exploits.

There are always going to be tactical weaknesses in the AI, if taking advantage of them is cheesy we'll soon reach the absurd conclusion that declaring war on the AI at all is an exploit. (In the case of camping archers at the AI capital it's the same tactical weakness that allows worker stealing: the AI doesn't realise when it should give its workers military protection. Neither tactic is resource free, even a completely successful worker steal where you get peace 15 turns later permanently ruins your diplomatic relations with the victim civ. I don't have a problem with either.)

[sooooo]

Agree. If something was definitely, 100% an exploit it would be on the exploits list. But it isn't so it's a matter of opinion. There's nothing wrong with avoiding tactics you believe to be exploits in your games, but I don't think it's right to point out and criticise these in other people's threads.

[Sirian]

I wrote most of a detailed reply on this general topic. Unfortunately, it was eaten in a crash as my instability woes that began last night remain unresolved.

There is a lot to be said and to be discussed, but it will have to wait until I have brought my computer back to a reliable state.


- Sirian

[Ronald]

I used the same tactic as Sulla because I wanted to have a weak next neighbour. Since it was my first AW game ever, I did not know what to expect. I thought it might be similar to the deity barbs in epic 4, so eliminating one enemy early seemed a good strategy to survive.

If I would have guessed how weak the AIs on noble with no tech trading are, I would not even have bothered to do anything against India, just develop a tech lead and then take the nice Indian cities to get even further ahead of the remaining AIs.

[Dreylin]

Well, I went for a different tack and (mostly) left Gandhi alone in the hopes that he'd build the Pyramids for me! Sadly he was more interested in sending out poorly defended Settlers, so just I got some free Workers instead.

(I would have got the Pyramids in 1382AD, but Saladin beat me by a turn ... he didn't have it for long though)

[Kylearan]

Hi,

And how exactly is that [early harassment] 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 CS slingshot is nearly broken, yes (I only think it's not completely broken because on Monarch it becomes a real gambit which can fail actually, and on higher levels becomes impossible). It's no exploit in my view because it uses features of the game that have been designed to do what they do. The fact that the AI panics when you park an archer at the capital, shutting it down completely, is a result of the AI programmers not having foreseen such an action, and not a feature of the design of the game.


Thinking back to Civ 3, why did we consider buying the AI worker as soon as possible in early BC times to be an exploit? Hey, if the AI is so stupid to offer it for money, then why not take advantage of it, and cripple the AI?

And why did we forbid to make peace with an AI and extort techs for it, only to declare war again immediately? I mean, if the AI is too stupid to see through that scheme, it deserves to be exploited!

There are some kinds of actions that break the game. Beating the AI because of clever play will never be an exploit, but doing something that shuts the AI down (more or less) just because the programmers didn't think of that one action completely breaks the balance of the game and should be avoided.


It looks like I'm the only one to consider this to be an exploit. Fair enough, I have to accept that. I will never resort to this in my games though, regardless how difficult they are or whether they are Always War games or normal ones. I for one like to overcome the challenge of the game the way it was originally meant to be.

-Kylearan

[Kylearan]

Hi,

This cannot be an exploit, because it is not listed in the disallowed exploits list.

Here at Realms Beyond, we have always handled things a bit differently. We tried to include as few items in the exploits list as possible, to keep things clean and easy to understand. We always have relied upon the players of our community to avoid questionable actions on their own - if in doubt, better not do it even if it's not banned explicitly. We try to play in this spirit, relying on self-control instead of rules lawyering (no offense meant!).

The downside of this, of course, is that it leads to discussion in cases like this, when it's not clear whether an action is questionable or not. I for one like these kinds of discussions, though.

-Kylearan

[Kylearan]

Hi,

I'd say on higher difficulty levels, any means to make the AW game easier would be allowed.

I'd like to disagree. An exploit is an exploit, regardless which level of difficulty you play on. By definition, an exploit breaks the game in some way that the original game design didn't mean to happen, so it should be avoided regardless of difficulty. Otherwise you could use the world builder on Deity from time to time if you think the game is too hard.

If I feel a given level of difficulty is too hard, I'd rather play on a lower level than to use "unfair" means.

This is my opinion for all kinds of exploits, not archer parking alone, and for tournament play only. What you do in private games is totally up to you of course. Fun is where you find it! It's only a game after all.

-Kylearan

[shadyforce]

New to RB, thought I'd add my 2 cents...

I strongly suspect that given the choice, the designers would have intended sending a sabotage team to enemy home territory very much a justified tactic, and the problem is not with the tactic, but with the AI's inability to deal with it.

The problem is, that while the above tactic is essentially exploitive, you have to also call exploits, every other tactic where the human innovates in a way that the AI can't possibly learn how to deal with. So unless you can code The Perfect AI, then there are always going to be tactical weaknesses on behalf of the AI because the programmers can't simply cater for the extraordinary limits of human ingenuity.

So the only reason anyone will call this (or other tactics) an exploit, is because it is especially obvious (the AI *should* be able to deal with it) and especially effective (to the point where the game stops becoming fun). Both of which are subjective opinions, and any community decision will purely be arbitrary.

So it's not a question of whether it is or isn't an exploit, but whether it's better for the community to decide to disallow it in it's Epics/Adventures.

My personal opinion would NOT be to exploit-ify it because the AI can somewhat deal with it (it tries to kill the unit from time to time), just not very well, and there are plenty of other tactics the AI can't deal with (eg. The Sirian Doctrine) and by the end of it, we'd be forcing people to play exactly as the AI do and disallow innovation and ingenuity just to make sure we don't have an unfair advantage over the AI.

[Sirian]

The fact that the AI panics when you park an archer at the capital, shutting it down completely, is a result of the AI programmers not having foreseen such an action...

That's not correct.

The first Always War test, the one Sulla mentioned, revealed that the Civ4 AI still had the same vulnerability to Pillage-n-Park as the Civ3 AI. Since I discovered Pillage-n-Park with the Civ3 AI, and was the Civ4 AI Analyst, one can imagine that I would be able to see a weakness of this sort within, oh, five or ten minutes -- and that would be correct.

So why is the vulnerability still there? Everything done during development comes with consequences. Any time spent on X comes at the expense of Y and Z. Every action A introduces side effects B and C. I'm not allowed to explain exactly why this hole is still there, but I can tell you that it is and has been a known issue, and is considered by the AI designer-programmer and his analyst to be an exploitable flaw. Sometimes one just has to accept that not every item on the wish list is going to be implemented, not every problem is going to be solved. That a problem remains does not necessarily mean the programmers couldn't see it.

I thought Sulla knew this, but perhaps he was not in the loop on this one.


The CS Slingshot is in the same category. Imagine if the effect attached to Bureaucracy were available much earlier in the game. It is such a strong boost, that getting to it quickly could be deemed to be the only right choice. So what to do about that? Well, how about delay it? Push it back. Only, if one failed to (say, hypothetically speaking) push it back far enough, it might be out of casual reach but still within reach of the Oracle or of a Prophet Lightbulb if, say, you AVOID researching a certain ancient tech.

Thus it's still (er, "hypothetically speaking, would appear still to be") the only right choice, if and when you can manage to reach it easily. Even if the Oracle is out of reach or can't be delayed long enough, you still have the Lightbulb (via Stonehenge or early religion). If I ever have to resort to an official RB mod, I expect I would push Bureaucracy back to Paper -- and not even that would be a perfect solution.

Thinking back to Civ 3, why did we consider buying the AI worker as soon as possible in early BC times to be an exploit? ... There are some kinds of actions that break the game.

What breaks the game differs person to person. However, any path that is so appealing as to find yourself doing the exact same things, strategically, over and over and over and over, leads to boredom (at least for the type of players drawn here, it does). That's why we play variants: to keep the freshness and exploration alive, to engage variety and challenge, to stave off the boredom.

Here at Realms Beyond, we have always handled things a bit differently. We tried to include as few items in the exploits list as possible, to keep things clean and easy to understand.

That's not exactly true. Civ3 was so rife with unbalanced options that I targetted as many of the offenders as possible and cared not a whit for how complex things became.

The difference in what made it in to the rules was whether the problem could be isolated. Some things, like ICS, were "dual use". Packing cities really close together could be done in trying to flip an enemy, or to park a tiny (but viable) half-city fishing village on a corner of land, or even "settling defensively" in a way that would reduce tension with the AI at a border with a foe you could not afford to have come and attack you. Rules that rely on players to make judgement calls might as well remain unwritten. However, anything not in that category, I wrote down. (For those who've never looked, the Civ3 Exploits List is several pages and dozens of items long!)

Although I do not regret having such a long rules list for Civ3, because there were so many issues with it that needed attention, the complexity of it kept a lot of players away. We at RB were the hardest of the hardcore. Since Civ4 is a much sturdier product, requiring less (but not zero) intervention, I aimed to widen our community by making the rules accessible to more players.


The idea, floated by some, that levels "below Monarch" can be written off, and that the real action is Emperor+, will be in for a disappointment. We will always have Emperor+ events, but they will be less than a third of the Epics, and only as many Extreme Adventures as participation seems to warrant.

Nor do I intend to encourage players who need the challenge presented by Emperor+ to "come down" to the level of the rest of the events and demoralize everybody else with "how easy" it all is if only you execute canned strategies (exploits) A, B, and C.

Pushing the difficulty factor higher over time is desired, but "difficulty factor" does not mean difficulty level.


Figuring out what needs to be ruled out for the better interests of the Epics is a challenging task. Some players are misreading my caution, but that's on me, to get the right rule set implemented and evolved as needed.

Pillage-n-Park will be ruled out, but since it falls under that painful "dual use" heading, the language will be a challenge.

Seed Corn will be ruled out. This one I believe I have already solved, but if I am mistaken it will get stickier before the mess is cleaned up.

The CS Slingshot is a beast that was wrongly thought to have been tamed, but is now rampaging worse than ever -- a great irony.

All three of these hot spots were known to the Civ developers, but for one reason or another are still in the game. This is why RB -has- an Exploits List, so that we can further correct things that could not be fixed in the design and development process.


- Sirian