Presaves - An Explanation

justanick

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There is some confusion about presaves. I do understand that and any concerns very well, because I was just as confused about them one and a half year ago. Let me sum up, what a presave is and what advantages and disadvatages it has. Let us assume there are three teams A, B and C that have their turns is that order.

Creating Presaves

* If a team - say B - wants a presave, the previos team (A) loads its save and clicks on the end turn button immediately. The resulting save (the presave) is sent to team B.
* Now, team A does its turn as usual and later sends the real save to team B.
* Team A is allowed to refuse making a presave for whatever reason.

What you may and may not do with presaves

* The team receiving a presave must not execute any irrevocable actions with the presave (like moving units or rushing projects). However, in real life nobody complains if you click away any dialogs that prevent you from looking at the save (like diplomatic offers).
* It is forbidden to pass information from the presave to other teams before the real save arrives.
* It is forbidden to click "end turn" on a presave.
* It is allowed to look at everything, experiment with the micromanagement of your cities or do any other revocable actions like fortifying or activating units.

Advantages of Presaves

* Presaves allow the next team to prepare their turn while the current team is still doing their own run.
* If a team often takes a long time for its turn, the people on the next team may not become angry if they regularly get presaves.

Disadvantages of Presaves

* It is sometimes possible to get some information from presaves that would not be available from the real save:
* Information on F11 is from the last turn and may not be the same in the current turn. To avoid this, the team making the presave is allowed to randomly change their micromanagement to disguise their values from F11.
* Barbarians move in between turns, so if the last team (C) makes a presave for the first team (A), team C will see how barbarians will move and may adapt its real turn with that additional information. This is a pretty bad information leak. To prevent that, as soon as barbarians show up, the referees havo to make the presaves for team A, while the people on team C are not allowed to make them any longer.
* If the team making the presave (say A) is involved in a war (e.g. with team C), the team receiving the presave (say B), may see damaged units of team A or C in the presave that are gone in the real save. So team B would know about the war and some of its outcome.
* Team B could see if team A has rushed a project with forced labour after making the presave.
* ... possibly more.

Presaves and cheating

* Presaves allow for even more cheating than the normal saves do.
* If somebody is intent on cheating, he or she can easily do so with just the normal saves. There are plenty of possibilities to get precise knowledge of many things that are happening on the whole map. There is nothing to prevent that, except the expertise and judgement of the referees.
* Compared to what you can theoretically do with real saves, presaves do not give much additional information to the cheater.

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To sum it up: The advantage of presaves is speeding up the game, the disadvantages are several slight information leaks that may or may not prove critical, depending on the game situation.

d73070d0 asked me to deposit this explanation here.
 
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