I was just reading the "Production overflow explained and the return of MM" article, which discusses some interesting little micromanagement "tricks". I'm new to the HOF, so I wanted to ask what everyone thinks of them. Are they customary and neccessary to be truly competetive, or are they considered exploits and forbidden? Or allowed, but not beneficial enough to worry about?

Anyway, three I can think of are:

Chopping extra forests with a production bonus in effect. (e.g. organized civs chopping 5 forests while building a courthouse. Just tested this. 5 forests should build the courthouse and almost build a settler, but in fact it's enough to build a courthouse, settler, and half a worker.)

Micromanaging research to maximize overflow from research with extra bonuses (e.g., from having more optional prerequisites).

Micromanaging production similarly.

I have been playing around a little with this. It all depends on how you are playing.

When chopping settlers and workers I always wait until the chop has 1 turn left before I switch to settlers. That way my cities can keep growing while the chop is going on.

I sometimes let research overflow if I have excessive cash, ie lower tech % so that there is 2 turns when 1 could do it, then boosting it to max for the last turn. It may only shave off one turn of this gauntlet game, but in others may help out.

I haven't tried chopping while building with a production bonus. In this gauntlet you need to chop in the beginning to get settlers, my trees are gone before I get to temples, courthouses, banks, or forges. It could REALLY help with a military rush though.

I don't think this matters TOO much for this gauntlet, but in others it could give a major advantage. I don't think there is a way to prevent it though.

First, this is the beta HOF thus these games really aren't official HOF entries. This sort of thing happened in the beginning with Civ3 as well and many, many iterations of HOF threw out entire games because exploits like this existed and there was no way to tell whether someone used them, also drastic rule changes (Firaxis fixes for bugs and exploits) required a new level playing field.

I expect all of this to happen again with Civ4, and as this exploit shows, its gonna happen quickly.

This is very heavily exploitable, and in more than simple ways. The worst ways are in connection to other more simple bugs, like say the bug I've posted about where a wonder thats already been built can remain in your production quene, even after you've received your gold for shields compensation.

Edit: I re-read the article and corrected myself. [/quote]Micromanaging production similarly.[/quote]As far as I remember, they over-corrected production. You are guaranteed to lose hammers if you overrun with bonues, the only micromanagement issue is how to minimize the loss.

I avoid them because of the micromanagement headache more than the fact it's an exploit.

Are they customary and neccessary to be truly competetive, or are they considered exploits and forbidden?
Civ4 is too young for anything to be customary, methinks. As far as forbidden goes, certainly not! One of the many reasons for the Beta is for threads like this (and I hope to see more) where tactics are identified and we can discuss whether or not they're exploits to be acceptable or not.

Of course some will be dealt with by Firaxis, as we're using the Beta to just wait out the patching.