Anarchy Exploit

An exploit to possibly ban from use in HOF: (perpetual anarchy to prevent unit loss from upkeep costs)
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=152148&page=3

(although you've probably come across it already )

Denniz said:

As was pointed out by Smirk, you have control of your player name. I don't know which does which but by setting them as below. My player and save files have my name automatically.

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Thanks Denniz! Thanks Smirk! I figured that out after I read what Smirk said.

Quantum7 said:

An exploit to possibly ban from use in HOF: (perpetual anarchy to prevent unit loss from upkeep costs)
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=152148&page=3

(although you've probably come across it already )

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Did you know that I haven't yet broken any HOF rules? I hope you guys think carefully before banning the game that has been played according to the known rules or you may scare someone from sharing their secrets.

Moonsinger said:

Did you know that I haven't yet broken any HOF rules? I hope you guys think carefully before banning the game that has been played according to the known rules or you may scare someone from sharing their secrets.

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It is the beta hall of fame. No one should expect any of their games to stay on the tables when the real one starts up. Personally I'm hoping that barbarians will be required to be on with the real hall of fame. If that's the case then about 90% of the beta hall of fame will be disqualified.

Moderator Action: I've split these posts into a new thread to keep the old one on topic.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

For the Beta Hall of Fame, this exploit is not banned. It might however get banned for the permanent Hall of Fame when we start that up, so feel free to discuss the pros and cons!

Anything that's not against the original rules is fine with me.

Moonsinger said:

I hope you guys think carefully before banning the game that has been played according to the known rules or you may scare someone from sharing their secrets.

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Moonsinger does raise a good point. The caveat that we've made (which I'm not particularly comfortable with, but have made is neverthess) is that we reserve the right to disallow games retrospectively where a tactic has been used that is later ruled to be an exploit. As such, if the players are unsure, then the onus is on the players to contact us for a ruling before the tactic is actually used in a submitted game.

BTW - We've banned the anarchy 'strategy' in the GOTM (there are only two 'exploits' on the table - anarchy (disallowed) and changing production to ensure that forest chops go to settlers / workers (allowed).

It's hard to come up with any reasons not to ban this exploit. Try a game doing what she did and you'll see how completely overpowered it is and how obviously unintended the methodology is. Some make the claim that while in anarchy you're losing out on city growth and production, but in actuality it doesn't even affect you. Each forest chop is producing another praetorian just about. You can still be churning out several praetorians per turn while in anarchy, until you run out of forests, but you should have won by that point This is basically an automatic win strategy on deity. Anarchy is not intended to save you 500+ gold per turn. It's supposed to be a penalty for changing civics. I expect this to be patched in a future patch but I also think it should be banned from the HoF, even the beta hall of fame. While I give major props to Moonsinger for inventing such a creative strategy, once you know how to use it it does not take any skill to pull off.

Hi Shillen,

Don't forget the ability to pop-rush too! Those newly captured cities from the AI are usually very large in size. If you don't pop-rush them, they are going to die of starvation anyway. Therefore, the forests aren't the only source of production. Note: Every pop-rush will make the city unhappy for like 10 turns or something like that, but who care. Unhappiness doesn't matter in anarchy.

If you ask me, it's the dumb city maintenance that's overpowered (against the human), on higher difficulties. Not pop rush or chopping.

ainwood said:

The caveat that we've made (which I'm not particularly comfortable with, but have made is neverthess) is that we reserve the right to disallow games retrospectively where a tactic has been used that is later ruled to be an exploit.

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Equally true for the Hall of Fame, even if unspoken in the rules.

Shillen said:

It's hard to come up with any reasons not to ban this exploit.

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Actually, banning the exploit would completely grain against the intentions of running a Beta Hall of Fame.

By allowing it, it'll actually get used and I'm kind of hoping it will. By having this temporary environment where exploits are not only allowed, but encouraged, we can find them and explore them faster. Hopefully, this will help Firaxis in patching better and faster.

Rather than dump Moonsinger's games, I thank her and salute her!

The larger intent is benefit for the Hall of Fame further down the road. During the initial patches of III, HOF games were retroactively withdrawn and at least once the entire tables scrapped. With a Beta Hall of Fame, we can simply wait things out and then start the permanent one when we're ready.

(So no, for those who were wondering, no Beta games are going into Quatro. However, we won't simply delete them, we'll likely archive Beta and save it for XP releases.)

Now, I'm not exactly seeking out controversy here, but analysis and honest debate now will just make the permanent Hall of Fame even stronger. Once I consider the game "finalized" and ready for the long haul, my only priority will be our competitive environment, so if Firaxis doesn't fix this in a patch before then, it will be banned for Quatro.

superslug said:

(So no, for those who were wondering, no Beta games are going into Quatro.

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So you're keeping the Q? Or was that just a mistake ?

Yeah, I'm really starting to like the letter Q. Quatromaster's Challenge sounds so much better than Cartographer's Challenge, doesn't it?

We're going to have Quantlets and semimonthly qupdates and I think Denniz is baking qupcakes...oh nevermind.

By allowing it, it'll actually get used and I'm kind of hoping it will. By having this temporary environment where exploits are not only allowed, but encouraged, we can find them and explore them faster. Hopefully, this will help Firaxis in patching better and faster.

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I think once the exploit is found there's no need for people to use them anymore. It just clutters up the tables and people will play out that exploit instead of trying new strategies and possibly finding other exploits. If the beta hall of fame gets filled with 350,000 point anarchy exploits games, then people will not bother even trying to get on the table without using that exploit, because they can't.

True Shillen.

I mean, those Anarchy conquest/domination games are pretty cool to jack up your score every now and then, but the true test comes in maintaining a standing empire; it's the sole purpose of the game. For the BHoF, I submitted a bunch of Anarchy games to see how high I could get my score on the tables, but I also played games just for the purpose of seeing how high a score I could get with Cultural, Diplomacy, and Spaceship victories, as these wins get their own categories of scores ( even more so once Quatro is fully active).

It's fun to compare how your wins stack up to others with every type of strategy/exploit, which is why I'm afraif others won't diversify their skills and just not say "hey, this is allowed, so lets fill up the tables with one type of game". The true measurement of skill are high scoring wins with multiple victory types done with empires to (quoted too much, but here goes) "stand the test of time".

I've got far to little time to play, to play around an obvious exploit. Unlike slug I'm not going to salute Moon, her strategy post should have been posted directly to the bugs forum. Come on.

At any rate, after this has been allowed, and after a patch fixes this, how are you going to keep the "beta" integrity without a complete wipe, or an examination of each high scoring game?

Smirk said:

At any rate, after this has been allowed, and after a patch fixes this, how are you going to keep the "beta" integrity without a complete wipe, or an examination of each high scoring game?

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The "wipe" is going to happen when Beta ends. Now if that means Moonsinger's games sit there, untouchable for a while, so be it.

The main integrity we're concerned about right now isn't the Beta overall, but the Gauntlet competition.

Smirk said:

I've got far to little time to play, to play around an obvious exploit. Unlike slug I'm not going to salute Moon, her strategy post should have been posted directly to the bugs forum. Come on.

At any rate, after this has been allowed, and after a patch fixes this, how are you going to keep the "beta" integrity without a complete wipe, or an examination of each high scoring game?

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I think you may be a little bit over-reacting here. First of all, I was the one who discover that anarchy exploit and I was the one that publish it. If didn't discover it or if I didn't publish it, you wouldn't have anything to complain about, would you?

Since this was a "beta" mumble jumble, I was just learning the game and trying something new and I did just that. If you look at the submittion date of my other games after that, you will see that none of them using that "anarchy" exploit. The bottom line, even myself don't use that exploit right after I discovered it. I don't mind if Superslug remove it today. In fact, by removing it, my other games that didn't using any exploit may surface. I was just playing other games for fun too; their scores weren't high either. I'm sure someone else could easily outscore them. The only reason I submitted them was because the HOF table at the Deity level was pretty much empty at the time.

Last but not least, none of my game has violated any HoF rules. Since I have been playing Civ4 for less two weeks until that point, I didn't really know much about Civ4. That anarchy exploit was uncovered by accident while I was messing around on Deity level. I didn't really know how to benefit much from it until after I posted an article about it. That 280K of mine was just a fast game and I wasn't even trying for anything. If you look at that game, the anarchy exploit didn't happen until toward the end. In the beginning, I was messing around with razing cities. If I have seriously used the anarchy exploit to aim for the highscore, I may have ended up with 350K or more.

This is kind of reminding me about the time I accidently discovered forcefield. Hey, I didn't violate any scientific rules or caused any body harm with my discovery. It's really up to humanity to decide what to do with my technology. If they decide to use it as a weapon to kill each other, that's not my problem. I don't care if they don't salute me or give me credit for my discovery, but trying to convict me for crimes against humanity was totally unjust. Of course, this was just another one of those bad dreams I often have. Sometimes, I wish I could have gone with the Elves at the end of that Lord of the Rings movie. Yes, that would be nice - a journey to into the undying land in the end.

I think Moonsinger did a good job, as everyone pointed out, figuring out bugs and unbalances is one reason we are doing a beta.
The earlier we find things like this the better.

Now there was an argument if this should be banned or not for the rest of beta.
I think it should.
If it is banned, this forces people to find other ways of playing and maybe other bugs.
I think of the Beta ruleset as a very evolving thing.
As we find new things that we consider exploit, we add them forcing people to find new ones until we figure we're stable enough,

Moonsinger said:

I think you may be a little bit over-reacting here. First of all, I was the one who discover that anarchy exploit and I was the one that publish it. If didn't discover it or if I didn't publish it, you wouldn't have anything to complain about, would you?

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I honestly think this was ingenious and deserves some recognition. Incredibly cheesy and totally ruins the game, but ingenious none the less! It took a quick mind, a lot of creativity, and a strong understanding of the game to come up with. Instead of retro banning these maybe we should create an Ingenuity HoF, where the developers of novel strategies/exploits are recognized for being the first to discover them.

This would be a good way to get people to continue to describe new tactics on the boards despite the harsh attacks that are sent their way when they do!

Just my 2 cents.

Chris105 said:

...Ingenuity HoF, where the developers of novel strategies/exploits are recognized for being the first to discover them.

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They have that, its usually contained in the patch readme. :/ Although credit isn't given to any particular person but then just because someone posts a strategy article on CF doesn't mean they were the first or only discoverer of the bug/exploit. There are many other civ fan sites, and many other channels to discuss bugs and exploits.

Now even ignoring the can of worms that would be opened trying to decide who did what first, who even cares? Exploring an exploit and then posting it on bugs and any other channel you care to in order to get the problem fixed deserves credit but its not typically done.


And finally I have no interest in raising up cheating in any form. Why support and reward behavior thats ultimately destructive to the concept of fair play?