Ring City Placement and Palace Jump, exploits?

[Aggie]

Well, a city can be a rotten location for a palace but still be as a settler factory or military producer. It could for example be located at the edge of the empire and therefore only benefit a limited number of cities.

Anyway, you are right that this limits the ideal palace jump situation more and more, but still I can imagine quite a few occasions.

[Nightfa11]

Palace Jump: Nice to do sometimes, but not a gamebreaker. UNLESS it's used in combination with a city giveaway to get all your troops to another continent.

RCP: I tried this in a recent game, and it's a very powerful technique. However, it doesn't always work. Now in my recent game with Aggie, I could have used RCP with very good results but I didn't think to try it. I think it needs to be experimented with more.

[anarres]

Palace Jump is IMO a valid move against a human, as is RCP.

Remember that you are playing another human, and as such you have the same tools at your disposal. Neither of these things break the game mechanics at all, they are intended functionality that the game was built with. They are only exploitative towards the AI because the AI can't or won't do them.

Please please please please please can someone address this point (that we are fighting humans, not stupid AI's that must be given a 'fair' footing). It seems that every time an exploit discussion happens in an MP scenario people don't distinguish between what are (IMO) true exploits in SP games, but in MP games are just 'tools of the trade'.

[Aggie]

anarres, I'm not talking about it being unfair vs the AI. I'm talking about software bugs. I believe these two items are just that.

[Eldakkar]

Anarres, I agree with you about the validity of RCP and place jumps.

However if you say that because both humans have the same tools at their disposal, you are also saying that both humans can use the infinite shield mobilization exploit, the army jump nightfa11 was referring to or the wealth/production in upkeep trick.

I do not think these should be used.

[anarres]

Hmm, maybe people are using these things in a way that was not envisaged, but I can promise you that your Palace reappearing when your Capital is lost was intended. If it didn't how would you calcualte distance calculations for corruption and culture flip chances? Also, where would you trade goods to and from with other Civs, and where would build the Spaceship?

The RCP (equal corruption at equal distances) could in no way be accidental. Maybe it was lazy programming (it was easier to take the loweset rank rather than the average of all cities at same distance), and maybe they thought that the consequences would not be huge to anyone that used this feature. At the very least I can say that it is not a "bug". That word is reserved for when your program does not work to specification, and I haven't read anything that says it should be the average rank.

But Aggie, consider the implications of 'banning' RCP. If I have 4 cities all distance 4.5 from my capital does that count as RCP? What it they are the best spots to settle? RCP doesn't even look to be very effective on 90% of maps due to the map specifics, banning it seems crazy to me.

[anarres]

quote:Originally posted by Eldakkar

However if you say that because both humans have the same tools at their disposal, you are also saying that both humans can use the infinite shield mobilization exploit, the army jump nightfa11 was referring to or the wealth/production in upkeep trick.

I do not think these should be used.

Well, those exploits you mention actually break the game mechanics. They are very obviously "cheats". Exploits consist (in my mind) of 2 very distinct types:

1) "Cheats": Exploits that deliberately break the game mechanics, and are 100% bugs, no interpretation needed. e.g. Infinite reload bug (now fixed), Mobilisation bug. Wealth bug.

2) Other "Exploits": These are things that keep within the intended functionality of the game, although some of them do things that are considered "unfair" because of the AI being unable to take advantage of them. (i.e. OCP, RCP, ICS, Mass Upgrading, Ship Hopping, Palace Pre-Build, Palace Jump, ...list is endless...)

Category (1) is obviosly cheating in any sense, and as such no-one could justify using them against humans or in a competative game.

Category (2) is much more subjective. Many people (me included) will not use many of these features against the AI in an SP game, since the AI is unable to use them too. One HUGE exception is the "Palace Pre-Build" exploit, everyone I know uses this all the time, every game. So, it is obviously an exploit as much as Ship-Hopping, ICS, RCP, Mass Upgrading since the AI can't do it (and never will), and as such is as unfair as any other exploit.

My conclusion: Only if an exploit can be classified as a "cheat", i.e. it deliberately breaks the game mechanics, can it be considered to be bannable. Everything else is (a) VERY subjective, and (b) not enforcable (even Palace Jump could be exploited if you say 'no abandoning the capital - what if you make war on a civ moving nearby and leave it undefended?).

[anarres]

A note on RCP:

The "equal distance = equal (lowest) corruption" factor means that ever opportunity I can I will build cities at equal distances from the capital. Even if just 2 or 3 cities share the same distance, you can still get decent corruption decreases.

Now tell me how you could possibly ban RCP, would you ban me from doing this?

If anyone manages to make a decent attempt at RCP and they don't get fucked from the amazingly bad land placement then they deserve a medal for ingenuity, not a slap on the wrist for being too clever.

I guess I feel strongly about this....

[ERIKK]

This ship hopping exploit seems a highly useable exploit in many games: it makes naval invasion much more effective: capacity is often a problem! Did you use it in your Killer PBEM game?

I know you used mass [u](very big mass)</u> upgrade by not hooking up saltpeter in our first game, but that is obviously no exploit at all.

[anarres]

My point ERIKK is that we need to think of what the word 'exploit' means, and why we use it at all.

In most instances it is used to describe 2 distinct things, as described in my post 3 above this one. Unless it is deliberately breaking the game mechanics it is not an exploit in MP games, IMO.

FWIW ERIKK, the huge numbers of ships required to use Ship Hopping negate it's effectiveness. In the Killer game I could have used my 10 ships to form 2 chains to his island, but that would have meant I coul donly get 3 units to his land every turn. That's not the way to do continental invasion. For a sustained attack I may have done that, but then sinking just 1 of my ships would have negated the chain it was in completely. The most common use for ship hopping is to get a leader across a gap just too big for 1 ship in 1 turn, in this case you would have 1 ship in harbour, and another at the pont of the first ship movement endpoint.

The real discussion is what Aggie is getting at. He considers RCP and the Palace Jump 'bugs'. You *must* have a Palace at all times if you have any cities, it is integral to the game mechanics, and as such you can't get away without the Palace Jump functionality in the game.

RCP is another matter, it seems unintentional (feature, not bug). However, the main problem with RCP is defining it. I am 100% serious whne I say that itis unenforcable. When does 'x' cities at the same distance become an exploit, and when is it jsut good city placement (without an eye to exactly equal distances)? For example, even if you decide that 3 cities is 'OK' to have equal distances, but 4 is 'exploitative', then when I have 3 cities all 4 tiles from my capital I am banned from placing another at exactly 4 tiles away. But what happens now when the AI plants a city in my path and the only viable tile left is exactly 4 tiles away? I haven't set out to 'cheat', but now I can't place my city in the only reasonable spot.