Road exploit

If you sign an open borders with another player, can you just build roads everywhere and bankrupt them?

Yes, although it's kind of cheesy to abuse the AI that way. It won't bankrupt them, but it will eat into their gpt, since the AI isn't smart enough to remove the roads that you build. Of course, it chews up your utilization of your workers, so there is a "cost" to you as well.

I've thought of this but never done it. I put this on par with selling resources for lump gold to a friend and starting to build a fort to disconnect it, Stopping, rebuilding the improvement, selling it again, rinse repeat.

tedious, but it means every 6 turns or so you get the full-price lump sum amount for something that you'd otherwise only get every 30 turns. The downside is, again, that worker can do nothing else. I don't tend to do anything like this because, as you say, it feels like an exploit and you hardly need to do such things to win.

The road-building "exploit" will actually hurt you, especially on lower levels, because you want your AI friends to have gold so you can trade for it. The AI is not very smart about using their gold anyway, allowing you to borrow it frequently every time you need to quick-buy some science buildings.

It's waste of time on immortal or deity AI as they have huge gpt anyway, and it hurts low difficulty AI but you wanted them to get higher gpt anyway so that they can trade full value.

Also building a fort over resource disconnect the lux only if you're already trading all of it away. If you don't have a copy provided by allied CS, you will suffer happiness loss.

^^^

This is true, but I wasn't talking about luxes--that's dangerous! Imagine doing a 4-city tall/tradition build. You usually have one source of horses or iron that you don't use but sell. You keep disconnecting that and you can get a LOT of gold. I've never done it due to moral implications, but unlike the road idea it seems like it's got far more advantages then downsides.

If you play Morocco it is quite advantageous to build radial roads that extend through other civs borders from your own land. your UA will attract a lot of trade routes but they won't be able to reach your civ if roads dont exist

danaphanous said:

^^^

This is true, but I wasn't talking about luxes--that's dangerous! Imagine doing a 4-city tall/tradition build. You usually have one source of horses or iron that you don't use but sell. You keep disconnecting that and you can get a LOT of gold. I've never done it due to moral implications, but unlike the road idea it seems like it's got far more advantages then downsides.

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Morals eh.

Do you ban warfare from your games too? AI is pretty bad at that as well.

Not doing it as a self-handicap is reasonable, but that's not a moral issue, just variant play for challenge.

I don't think you can make a rational case against pillage-sell without banning standard gameplay tactics you/most players accept under the same criteria.

haha, hey I don't care if other people do it. But that much early gold is too good. I like to give the AI a chance. Basically anything on this level I ban myself from doing so I don't know what "other high level tactics" you mean. Maybe I do none of them. So yes, definitely "self-handicap" is a better expression.

But there is a rational distinction to me. It's not so much morals as fairness. I tend to only employ strategies that seem balanced in that there is SOME downside and it seems like they were built in purposely. Worker stealing has a downside, you have a war. Sure you can usually count on the AI being unable to mobilize an invasion, but the mechanic is both realistic and has a downside--war for some turns. The fact that I might not care about the war doesn't matter, it's clearly something the developers purposely put in and it feels realistic. CS-worker stealing is probably on this level, and I'll admit I've done it, but usually at least one AI has met them so you still get the minor diplo penalties and can only do it once. Also war, sure the AI sucks at war, but they have 3-4x my units on Deity and still can invade and fight you so yeah you can take advantage of their predictable tactics but that's different then fort-sell in my mind. In my mind starting to build a fort to disconnect a single resource repeatedly is exactly the same as DOWing to get gold for free but without the diplo downsides or the war. Every other kind of trick like this is punished in some way so the fact that this one isn't seems a programming error to me. I've often wished if you remained friends deals would resume when you reconnected rather then just canceling, it would add to the realism. I never employ gold exploits unless I'm trying for a speed record (which is rare). I usually trade for all my lump gold to buy science buildings, even if it costs me gpt, and honor the deals for 30 turns. I don't need to do more to win Deity games and I don't care much about speed after trying to strats once or twice, but that's me. I know in competitive games players utilize everything they can to get the best times and I respect that because you're playing each other, not the AI.

TheMeInTeam said:

Morals eh.

Do you ban warfare from your games too? AI is pretty bad at that as well.

Not doing it as a self-handicap is reasonable, but that's not a moral issue, just variant play for challenge.

I don't think you can make a rational case against pillage-sell without banning standard gameplay tactics you/most players accept under the same criteria.

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I disagree with this. Taking advantage of terrain etc when waging war against the AI can, in a way, be compared to using superior strategic planning when playing against an inexperienced friend.

The difference between this being an exploit and strategic usage of mechanics is that the AI is programmed in a certain way to perform its action according to a given directive, right? Compare this to playing chess against the same opponent over and over and over. In the latter case you will eventually learn the patter your opponent is using, given that he always uses the same tactic, and you will therefore learn how to play according to this. You will be able to predict his/her moves and thus learn to prevent certain events from ever taking place.

In the case of pillage-exploiting though: that's more like, following along the same anekdote, you sacrificing your queen to take a runner, and a few turns later just placing the queen back on the board pretending that nothing happened.

There is indeed a difference in exploiting a mechanic that the devs seems to have overlooked compared to using you knowledge of the opponent to your advantage.

I mean: in order to make up for its stupidity, the devs gave the AI massive bonuses to a lot of things, since they knew perfectly well that a smart human player would easily outclever the ai in combat. Thus, they had to balance it out in some way and therefore gave the AI such insane advantages, right?

What did they do to counteract pillage-exploitation and/or road spamming?

I have thought of this but chose to not exploit it. For if the AI was a human player, it would've declared war on me instantly and kill all the workers and repair the damage.

As for the Fort exploit, I chose to not do it as well for if the AI was a human player, first time would work because he would assume you got caught with your pants down but second time, he'll get suspicious and stop trading with you for the rest of the game as he choose to spend gold on other more worthy trading partners. A trading partner that constantly reneg and break it's own deals is a worthless person and deserves to be ignored. Or should be just annexed.

edibleshrapnel said:

...can you just build roads everywhere and bankrupt them?

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As others have pointed out, you are not going to bankrupt the AI by doing this.

That said, if workers would otherwise be idle (and it is premature to delete them), I tend to build a lot of roads in CS territories on (or within) my borders. Neighboring AIs get some of this treatment too.

My logic is (1) useful movement for my units at no cost, and (2) the way the CS moves units around, the player may need redundant paths. Plus, eventually, there will be a CS quest to connect to them, so might as well do that ahead of time.

But as Browd points out, this comes at the opportunity cost of worker turns.

It also seems to me that having roads in their territory helps the CS defend themselves. I would like to know if I am causing the CS economic troubles, but I have never noticed any indications of that.

beetle said:

As others have pointed out, you are not going to bankrupt the AI by doing this.

That said, if workers would otherwise be idle (and it is premature to delete them), I tend to build a lot of roads in CS territories on (or within) my borders. Neighboring AIs get some of this treatment too.

My logic is (1) useful movement for my units at no cost, and (2) the way the CS moves units around, the player may need redundant paths. Plus, eventually, there will be a CS quest to connect to them, so might as well do that ahead of time.

But as Browd points out, this comes at the opportunity cost of worker turns.

It also seems to me that having roads in their territory helps the CS defend themselves. I would like to know if I am causing the CS economic troubles, but I have never noticed any indications of that.

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CS dont use gold for anything. All their troops and buildings are maintenance free. Also unit upgrade is free of charge