Is Reloading a Save Cheating?

Is loading the game ~10 or more turns back because you made a fatal and easily preventable mistake in that time period cheating?

For example; you have city A with some defensive units, city B with some as well, and a capital with only 1 garrison. Civ B rushes your capital and captures it before you can transport any troops there; you may have not noticed the troop buildup or have been preoccupied with another war, but in any case you've lost your cap and, most likely, the game. Is loading the game back 10 turns and then transferring troops before the attack happens when you play the 2nd time considered fair, or do you have a moral obligation to just suck it up and start a new game, even if the start that you got was good or better?

I just want to hear everyone's opinions on this.

In a single player game, cheating is whatever you say it is, I guess. I don't do it. I wouldn't have learned how to play doing that.

It's subjective
If I have to reload, then I consider the game "lost", but I may still play on for fun.
(for challenges though, for honesty purposes, reloading is considered cheating by many except for if your game/computer crashes while you play it)
I think for learning purposes, reloading helps: it allows you to see the different paths you could've chosen and the consequences of each. Of course it won't help if you don't learn from your mistakes.

Why, yes. Yes it is.

Well, darn. Now the validity of my deity t292 finish Poland game is ruined because I had to reload ONCE when Assyria DOWed me out of the blue.

...or do you have a moral obligation... ?

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Its just a game, you don't have any obligations.

The bigger point is that it might be more fun and rewarding if you lived with the consequences. If you keep on reloading games, you never learn to play better; whether that means avoiding the original mistake, or learning to adapt to the chance that something goes wrong.

People also easily get addicted to reloading, which is a game killer, too.

Reloading due to keyboard or mouse error, no.

It depends why you reload. Did you accidentally just click for your worker to go up to a barbarian when you though you had your warrior selected? Reload. Did someone beat you, narrowly, to a wonder? Don't reload. Did you get a bad start? Well, that's not really reload as much as it's starting a new game, but whatever, go ahead.

What you describe is cheating yes, at least in my mind. However, you should feel free to do whatever you want ! I might do what you're doing if I really wanted to win that game for whatever reason and feel ok about it. But it's not super legitimate.

Reloading because of a misclick is fine though, or even a stupid mistake like thinking something was a plains when it was a hill or something.

I have occasionally reloaded after trying to take a city with a melee unit and failing, which is probably cheating as well... but I feel it's pretty unfair that the damage toolbox is completely useless in those cases. Sometimes I can't get the city all the way down to 0 and I'm not sure, planning to reload if I'm wrong.

It is my opinion, that the only way you can cheat in single player is to mod the game to God Mode, or use a glitch.
If a person reloads to a previous save, it can provide a good measure to play out a particular situation in a number of different ways. By this I mean to point out, it can teach a player to look for patterns with the AI. So it that instance, I feel it can be a valuable training tool in playing the game.

brianshapiro said:

Its just a game, you don't have any obligations.

The bigger point is that it might be more fun and rewarding if you lived with the consequences. If you keep on reloading games, you never learn to play better; whether that means avoiding the original mistake, or learning to adapt to the chance that something goes wrong.

People also easily get addicted to reloading, which is a game killer, too.

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Wait, so after reloading 10 times to get at least a decent start and pouring 5-7 hours into a game it's more fun to just stop playing just because I made an easily fixable mistake?

I have lots of different answers to this question.

1. If you are playing a game-of-the-month and planning to submit the results, then it is clearly cheating, since it violates the GOTM rules -- and other people are involved.

2. If you are just playing a game for the fun of it, then it is hard to see how you can cheat yourself. Are you being deceived, misled, or swindled? No; you know exactly what you are doing. No one else is involved.

3. If you didn't at least think it was cheating, why did you ask the question?

4. Are you "cheating yourself" out of the opportjnity to learn how to recover from a mistake?

5. I sometimes reload because of mis-clicks. (I currently have to play on an annoying ASUS laptop that has a bugged touchpad driver. When recharging the battery while playing, the touchpad sporadically acts crazy and thinks you clicked when you haven't. It also gets confused about the mapping between touchpad coordinates and game coordinates when you zoom in or out.)

6. I sometimes deliberately save a position intending to replay from that point in order to test different strategies.

The worst is when I give an order with the wrong unit selected, reload, and then do the exact same thing again

Magma_Dragoon said:

The worst is when I give an order with the wrong unit selected, reload, and then do the exact same thing again

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This

As many other people have said, this is a question that only you can answer. Speaking for myself, I'll sometimes reload if I make a really stupid mistake (embarking when attacking a city, say) or misclick, but I don't reload if I just miss out on a wonder or a good city location. But again, it's entirely up to you to decide what's cheating and what isn't - and if reloading a save helps you enjoy the game the more, than as far as I'm concerned that's not cheating.

It is cheating unless you had a mis-click, or if you spent a great engineer and were still beaten to a wonder because screw that.

If you feel like you're cheating and it hinders your sense of accomplishment (and your enjoyment), then you're cheating.

Well, considering the AI doesn't play by the same rules a human player does... I'd say being able to "time travel" (reloading a save to change the outcome of something) is a valid human tactic. The game is more challenging without it, though and learning to adapt to situations instead of just reloading out of them is necessary for full enjoyment - and multiplayer games.

As for reloading for achievements being cheating, I disagree with this. Early in my Civ V gaming when I was first playing, I was hunting achievements as I played. In one game I was close to both a diplo and a science victory so I saved the game, popped the science victory for the achievement, reloaded and didn't move the spaceship part so I could also get the diplo victory credit. I'd already done all the groundwork for each victory condition so getting credit for both off one game is not something I'd consider cheating - instead it'd be efficient time management.

I've also done specific things for achievements and then reloaded (like allowed barbs to sack a city or rushed specific wonders using an engineer to get the credit then reloaded and tried to build it normally without the pressure of the hunting the achievement making me rush).

I would reload when I make a technical error.. like pressing B on settler stacked with archer when I was supposed to use the archer...

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If you want to know whether something is cheating, ask yourself this:

If you were to do that in a multiplayer game and the other players knew what you did, would they mind?

Example 1: you miss-clicked and your siege unit moved into a pond next to the city you want to attack. Reasonable people won't mind if you reload.

Example 2: You thought you could beat another player to a wonder by building it. He beats you to it, you reload 3 turns earlier and use your GE.
No one would put up with that.