OK. I'm in the process of trying to strip the DLC shit out of the save. If I can't manage that I will have to regenerate it I guess. I really liked that one though...
@T-Hawk I don't believe the AIs will penalize you diplomatically for declaring war to break deals. In any case it's definitely broken (and not even the knowledge that Civ 3 had broken stuff too can convince me otherwise ).
Research agreements represent the worst poison pill in Civ5's design. They are worse than tech trading from past games for a couple of reasons:
* The AIs will never refuse to sign them, regardless of how bad relations might become. You have to pay more, but they will always sign them.
* You can exploit Rationalism and Porcelain Tower with "median" position on the tech tree to convert modest amounts of gold into insane amounts of beakers. (The AI has no idea how to do this.)
* Regardless of the issues with tech trading, you couldn't trade for techs that the AI didn't already have. Thus at best you can only pull even with the top AIs through tech whoring. Research agreements, on the other hand, can easily catapult the player further down the tree, even if no AIs have the techs in question.
* Research agreement also disappears if the highly aggressive Civ5 AI decides to declare war before completion - which they do frequently. Irritating in a solo game, more or less makes it impossible to fairly compare results in a competitive setting.
Whoever came up with the whole "research agreement" concept, at least in this particular implementation, has earned themselves a lifetime of bad strategy game karma, let me tell you...
As long as there is sufficient interest, however, there's no reason not to run at least one event to see how things go. I might recommend playing at least one game without restrictions in place, so that the community of interested players can see where the worst balance holes lie. Alternately, take out research agreements and selling stuff to the AI for gold, as those are by far the worst abuses possible in the gameplay. (Seven is right - you are not penalized at all for breaking active deals by declaring war. Umm, exploitable much?)
I wouldn't want to play a game with selling stuff to AI permitted. I feel such a game would become a competition of who can abuse the AI better, and it's not fun and not a Civ game
The main problem with research agreements is, you can't turn them off. You can play not signing any, but AIs will still sign them with each other. I don't think they're too much of a problem when the player can't get free gold from AI and can't spam them. However, if we put a restriction like "you can't suggest a RA, but can sign one if an AI suggests it", or ban them altogether, I'd be happy too
Seven, I don't have any DLCs except Mongolia, let me know if you want me to try to open the save. Not sure if it would be helpful, but could be worth a try
I don't see anything wrong with banning all research agreements for the player. If the game becomes too difficult you can just lower the difficulty level some. The AIs already aren't playing the same game as the human anyway.
When playing Civ5 SP, I would generally not sign any research agreements to try to rebalance the game, and could still win on Emperor/Immortal. Banning them does not handicap the player significantly. I agree with Sulla and would suggest playing this game with these caveats:
1. No research agreements.
2. No deals that involve lump sum gold from an AI.
3. No selling open borders.
I think selling luxuries/strategic resources to an AI for GPT should be allowed, as it is not nearly as exploitable. In this, it is like resource selling in Civ4, where you could not offer or take lump sums of gold for deals that last x number of turns.
That being said, I could see an argument for playing this first adventure without any restrictions in the interest of letting the players discover what is broken and what is not.
T-hawk Wrote:All of this existed in Civ 3, and we never banned these moves there.
Exploit Rules for Civ 3:
DIPLOMACY EXPLOITS "Phony Peace Treaty": In some areas, the game does not have reasonable, sensical, or sufficient penalties in place for dishonorable acts. The absolute worst such case involves peace treaties. Your diplomatic reputation in no way impacts peace treaty negotiations and AI concessions given in trade for twenty turns of peace. Even when you establish your civ's policies to be the most vile, cheatful, deceptive policy, the AI's still blindly trust your word when it comes to peace treaties, and this is both unfathomable and imbalancing to the game. Making Phony Peace Treaties to wring free concessions out of the AI's, then turning around to declare war again immediately or at your next convenience, is exploitative. You could do it once, but your word would then be dirt at the peace treaty negotiation table, and realistically, no civ would offer you concessions for peace thereafter, not until there was a regime change at least -- but in Civ3 there is never a regime change, you are like an immortal with absolute control over your civ for its entire history, so there are limits in applying history to this circumstance. For the purposes of RBCiv Epics, phony treaties are never allowed. It may be possible to compensate for the AI's overly trusting nature, its inability to discern when its better off staying in a permanent state of war with your civ than making phony peace with you on your terms, but that would become convoluted and it would also be controversial. We need to keep our standards simple, so unless and until such time as a future patch addresses this loophole, no Phony Peace Treaties. If you accept cities or technologies as part of AI concessions for peace, you are required to honorably observe the full twenty turn duration of the peace treaty. Maps, chump change, and per-turn agreements (including any sum of gold per turn) do not rise to the level of exploitive, so are not concessions that would prevent you from breaking a treaty at your pleasure. "Sabotaging Trade" is an exploit. Intentionally breaking the trade route (pillaging a road, selling off your harbor, etc) after selling per-turn goods for lump sum payments, or acquiring lump sum goods (like techs) for per-turn payments, is exploitive. The game is not programmed to deal with this kind of piracy and fraud appropriately. Even though it could nominally have a place in the game, the game isn't set up for it, so for RBCiv Epics events, this move is not allowed. "Instant Palace": abandoning your capital earlyish in the game, for the purposes of moving the Palace without having to build a new Palace -- especially by way of disbanding your capital by building a settler, then resettling -- is exploitive. "Grand Theft": If you steal tech and you grab the one you are currently researching, you get the select next tech popup. If you then click "The Big Picture", you don't go to the tech screen but to the steal tech screen, where you can steal another. This is strictly prohibited.
[SIZE=2]WARFARE EXPLOITS "RoP Rape": Using Right of Passage to move whole armies into attack position is an egregious exploit. The point being, the turn-based nature of the game in combination with this loophole in the rules offers a benefit way out of proportion to what even the most clever betrayal could ever hope to manage. No RoP Rapes in RBCiv Epics! This includes moving units into attack position then pulling some stunt to lead that civ to declare against you (like spy activity, or demanding they leave your territory) with the express intent of foiling the letter of this rule while still wholly pursuing the something-for-nothing spirit of this exploit. Don't go there. "Spousal Abuse": It's possible for a civ you are at war with, or about to attack, to have an MPP with a nation with whom you have Right of Passage. If ANY action of yours results in the activation of that MPP, or will do so, you are not allowed to make use of the Right of Passage. You are especially prohibited from moving your troops across the RoP terrain and into attack position on either MPP partner. You are obliged, as a participant in RBCiv Epics events, to follow the spirit of this rule: no free military rides via RoP in a way that circumvents the cultural control of territory. "Throwaway Cities": With the addition of the "Abandon City" feature, it is now possible to use settlers to indefinitely extend your cultural reach on any given turn. Given enough settlers, you can gain an effective RoP Rape without need for the RoP, by capturing or settling, moving a setter one tile further in, abandoning the old city, founding a new one, rinse and repeat. This is an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise reasonable and useful new option. To prevent the defeat of enemy zones of cultural control via throwaway cities, a number of prohibitions are now necessary: 1) You may not abandon a city on the same turn you capture it. 2) You may not abandon any captured city with active resisters remaining. 3) You are strictly prohibited from moving settlers into or through the territory of ANY city you intend to abandon. What you ARE allowed to do is to raze or abandon a city, let cultural borders adjust, then you can move the settlers through if you wish, coping with the enemy's cultural control zones. "Whipping Loophole": When cities become so unhappy that they cannot sustain a single content face, it should be impossible to wring any more forced labor out of them. Yet there are still ways to do so, and these are all exploits. The most well known is that of adding workers to size 1 specialist-only cities to keep on whipping them.
"Cultural Push": Building cities within two tiles of existing cities, right on the edge of front lines, for the sole purpose of pushing back borders then repeating, such that you completely take over a rival's territory without having to declare war, is an exploit. This applies only to intentional use of the densest possible settlement patterns, on the front lines, to aggressively take over another civ's lands without a declared war. This kind of encroachment would qualify as an act of war, yet the game does not recognize it as such. This is not the same as settling close to the enemy or getting into a cultural war to control key resources or tiles along the border. This refers specifically to encroachment deep into rival territory by waves of cultural push. Doing this during peacetime is an exploit: you may do it during RBCiv Epics events only if you first declare war, just the same as if you were settling inside their territory. "Baiting the AI": Although the AI has been VASTLY improved since the days of the release version when it would sell out its whole strategic position to capture a worker anywhere within a billion miles of its units, there is still some exploitive factor in using workers as sacrificial lamb targets to bait the AI into exposed positions or delay or weaken an attack by diverting the enemy. "Puppet Strings": During a war, when enemy units (yours or those of another AI) move into attack range of an AI city, that AI's whole offensive army will move toward the endangered city. This is not something you can avoid, even, if you send out raiders to pillage or an assault force to attack. However, it can be exploited in such a way as to paralyze an enemy force, pulling their puppet strings to make them dance back and forth. Moving a diversionary unit or attack near an enemy city, then moving in and out and in and out of attack range, to pull the puppet strings, is an exploit. This exploit was discovered by Cyrene and confirmed by Sirian in RBD9 SG. This also explains why AI's who come under attack by an alliance of civs usually crumble so quickly: their units get locked into unintended puppet string manipulations by frequent enemy attacks, and their armies are paralyzed with indecision over being yanked around, and the civ gets torn apart. To some degree, the AI is so dumb in this regard it can't be helped, so don't make special effort to work around this flaw, but likewise don't go out of your way to exploit this during any RBCiv Epics games.
Exploit Rules for Civ 3: Wrote:"Phony Peace Treaty": ... Your diplomatic reputation in no way impacts peace treaty negotiations and AI concessions given in trade for twenty turns of peace.
Yes, this was a loophole. As part of a peace treaty, the AIs would ignore your reputation, and still accept any per-turn payments in return for lump-sum goods. Does Civ 5 have the same loophole?
Quote:"Sabotaging Trade" is an exploit. Intentionally breaking the trade route (pillaging a road, selling off your harbor, etc) after selling per-turn goods for lump sum payments, or acquiring lump sum goods (like techs) for per-turn payments, is exploitive. The game is not programmed to deal with this kind of piracy and fraud appropriately.
That writeup is outdated. In a patch, the AI was fixed to consider that as breaking the player's reputation. How does Civ 5 handle that?
Sullla, if you're reading, can you offer some opinions here? I'm not qualified to determine rules for Civ 5 events. Do you think we're okay for one game without any restrictions to gauge the environment?
Yes, we did have to write a banned moves list for Civ3. The gameplay had a lot of holes in it, in part because of Civ3's tortured development history (lead designer leaving Firaxis halfway through development), in part because games in the pre-Internet era didn't get the rigorous treatment from the fan community that they do now. Civ3 was one of the first TBS games where the online community really played the game to death and figured out all of its balance holes - people were of course posting on bulletin boards for Civ2/SMAC, but not nearly to the same extent. What developers could get away with in 2001 is a lot different from what they can get away with today. That's why I'm so critical about Civ5: the bar has been raised over the last decade, and it falls back into so many of the same easily-avoidable balance holes from earlier games. If your argument in defense of Civ5 is "it's no worse than a game that came out ten years ago", well, I don't find that very persuasive. We can and should expect improvement over time.
T-Hawk: since the gameplay holes in Civ5 are well understood and well documented, I would suggest going with oledavy's list of restrictions:
oledavy Wrote:1. No research agreements.
2. No deals that involve lump sum gold from an AI.
3. No selling open borders.
Start with those, and if necessary add more later. We probably don't need to see a game or two of abusive resource sales and mass research agreements - those are already well established by now. In response to T-Hawk's other question, there is no "reputation" in Civ5, and breaking deals will never stop the AI from trading with you. It costs more to purchase things when relations are bad, but if you have the gold on hand, they will always trade with you, no matter how awful you are to them.
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