How many of you 'cheat' when playing single-player?

As there's always complaints about the amount the AI 'cheats' (i.e. it's handicaps on higher levels), I'm curious about how many players do no-reroll/restart/HOF/noquitters style games in single-player versus how many do things to give themselves an advantage.

Edit: Note, no judgement here - I certainly do some of these on different occasions.

Am I really the only one who never reloads? Really?

I don`t reload because something went wrong. I don`t reload cos things never went my way. I don`t reroll a start, I accept whatever the land is like.

If I`m playing and i`m hopelessly losing I`ll just stop playing that game and call it a `lose`. You`d hate playing chess with me!

1, 2, and 3.

I play the game for fun first so if I get a terrible start I will reroll, I'm not really interested in digging myself out of a giant hole the entire game. I will load an earlier save if I go to steal a work and use fire (with a ranged unit) instead of move to capture it. That is about the only time I do that though. I use 3 because I like being able to see all the statistics and don't care for achievement anyway.

1,2,4. Well...the mods...aren't supposed to be unbalancing, but in the end they are. If you ever saw what kind of crazy units you can have just using scout>horseman upgrade mod and unlimited XP from barbarians. Sometimes I use Really Advanced Setup mod, and give myself a little better starting position. Well...once I really overshot and had my capital, as Spanish, set right under Sri Pada (for observatory) and within range of Kilimanjaro and Solomon's Mines. Plus, I use it to make sure I have at least bit of strategic resources around, I hate having to hunt for uranium or aluminum so much.

Sarin said:

1,2,4. Well...the mods...aren't supposed to be unbalancing, but in the end they are. If you ever saw what kind of crazy units you can have just using scout>horseman upgrade mod and unlimited XP from barbarians. Sometimes I use Really Advanced Setup mod, and give myself a little better starting position. Well...once I really overshot and had my capital, as Spanish, set right under Sri Pada (for observatory) and within range of Kilimanjaro and Solomon's Mines. Plus, I use it to make sure I have at least bit of strategic resources around, I hate having to hunt for uranium or aluminum so much.

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Lol might as well have been plying on Settler if you give yourself THREE natural wonders within your capital as Spain and add uranium to your location lol

I only restart bad starts because I play exclusively on Deity and I just can't be bothered to put in one hour of game time into a tundra/snow start only to have Korea, the Shoshne and Persia compete for who outpaces me the fastest for the entire game.

I reload when I do something really stupid like lose a crucial unit for not paying attention or missclicking, or when I spend 29 turns building a wonder, only to lose it by 1 turn to to the AI and then see that I hadn't optimised production for it.

I'll reload sometimes if I make a stupid error. Also, if a start is terrible as (as stated above) I don't want to spend a whole game playing catch up.

However, I do use Mods so I guess that is some form of cheating.

How is pillaging to heal an exploit ?

I think that refers to pillaging, repairing, then pillaging again.

DoctorMcGann said:

I think that refers to pillaging, repairing, then pillaging again.

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Oh right. I have the same approach to that as I do for stealing workers : only on Deity.

Socratatus said:

Am I really the only one who never reloads? Really?

I don`t reload because something went wrong. I don`t reload cos things never went my way. I don`t reroll a start, I accept whatever the land is like.

If I`m playing and i`m hopelessly losing I`ll just stop playing that game and call it a `lose`. You`d hate playing chess with me!

Click to expand...

Sometimes, I reroll for a handicap. And there really isn't wrong in resigning in Chess. More wins for me. xD

Only "I'll reroll a start I don't like."

1 and rarely 2. 2, not 'when things don't go my way', but rather when I have a brain fart because of fast play and press the wrong option, i.e. liberating a city rather than annexing.

I reroll. In my defense, my buddies and I do it when we're MPing together too. Sometimes, you get not just lemons but ROTTEN lemons.

I believe that in order to "cheat", there has to be a victim. And I don't think you can cheat yourself. I play Civ for fun, and it is sometimes no fun to slog through a start with no resources and little production and an aggressive neighbor. So I throw away a lot of bad starts.

I'll also sometimes deliberately save a game at a point where I want to test something unusual. And if it works out terribly (as it often does), I'll go back to the save and replay from there.

The only exception I see when playing single-player is if you are playing something like a game-of-the-month that you indent to submit. Then reloading is cheating because there is clearly a victim: the other people playing and submitting that game.

tpac said:

As there's always complaints about the amount the AI 'cheats' (i.e. it's handicaps on higher levels), I'm curious about how many players do no-reroll/restart/HOF/noquitters style games in single-player versus how many do things to give themselves an advantage.

Edit: Note, no judgement here - I certainly do some of these on different occasions.

Click to expand...

What's pillage heal?

krc said:

I believe that in order to "cheat", there has to be a victim. And I don't think you can cheat yourself.

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Well the victim can be yourself, and yes, you can cheat yourself, whether you lie to yourself to believe something that isn`t true or whatever. Think about it.

But a person can cheat himself.

I rarely reload in Civ V, only when I misclick and do something I didn't actually mean to do.

I will reload a very poor starting location, though I play Legendary Start (I like actually having resources to improve, and land that is worth settling since cities cost happiness) so that rarely comes up.

I do much more reloading in Civ IV: some civs seem to have an "awful" start bias so I will regenerate the map until I find something interesting, and I will occasionally reload an autosave after losing a combat at >90% odds.

I occasionally turn off barbarians because I find them annoying(NOT challenging).

Socratatus said:

Well the victim can be yourself, and yes, you can cheat yourself, whether you lie to yourself to believe something that isn't true or whatever. Think about it.

But a person can cheat himself.

Click to expand...

Here's the first definition of the transitive verb "to cheat" from Merriam-Webster:to deprive of something valuable by the use of deceit or fraud.

You can certainly fool yourself. If you reroll starts until you get a good one and you reload save games when you miss a wonder by one turn but you still tell yourself that you win those games because you are such a great player, then you are (as you say) lying to yourself. But you are not cheating yourself. There is no deceit; it's not as though you didn't watch yourself do those things. There is no fraud; there is no cover-up.

And it's not clear to me if rerolling bad starts is any different from playing with "legendary start" resources. Or only playing the Inca on a highland map, or Indonesia on archipelago or small islands. None of which (I think) counts as cheating, since they are designed into the game as options you can choose.

It's also not really clear if playing a computer game for fun and doing any of the things listed in the poll that started this thread can ever "deprive (yourself) of something valuable". Oh look, I just deprived myself of the opportunity to play Carthage in a starting position on a northern ocean with access to the rest of the world blocked on both sides by ice. Without a river or a hill or a mountain anywhere near the coast. And one whale and one truffle as the only luxury resources in sight. What a valuable opportunity I have wasted!

I agree, I really don't think rerolling your starting conditions is necessarily cheating. It would be effective to not completing a game before starting a new one. You're just deciding rather quickly that you don't like the current one and would rather take a chance with another. Also, those challenging starts can sometimes be more fun to play with than a start where you have everything.