Dancing on the Abyss

It seems that any evil civilization, or anyone who builds the prophecy of Ragnarok can indefinitely postpone the apocalypse with a bit of careful planning.

The apocalypse counter stops once it reaches a hundred so any downwards change at 100 brings it below the apocalypse threshold. As an evil civilization Eidolons can be built at Malevolent designs, they can then be deleted to reduce the AC. Having enough Eidolons on hand however can be tricky as they are a fairly expensive unit.

With the Prophecy of Ragnarok things become a lot easier. If it is in a military production centre then it can probably build a scout per turn, which can then be deleted leaving the AC permanently at 99.

Is it worth the expense to your empire? I don't know. I used the prophecy of Ragnarok solution to prevent the world ending as a Grigori en route to a conquest victory. To lose most of my heroes to the apocalypse would have been fairly devastating for my military effort and I only needed to keep it up for a few dozen turns.

Seems more like an exploit than a strategy.

When a unit is built in the city with the prophecy of Ragnarok I'm pretty sure it increases the AC by one. Killing the unit only cancels out this increase.

When a unit is built in the city with the prophecy of Ragnarok I'm pretty sure it increases the AC by one. Killing the unit only cancels out this increase.

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The AC has a maximum which it can't go over. Building a unit which adds to the AC after the maximum has been reached won't add to it. Removing it will still make it decrease.

In single player at least the AC may be hit on the computers turn, or at the start of your turn(events, builds, etc.) but won't trigger until the end of your turn. Deleting a unit which adds to the AC at this time will leave it a single point away from the apocalypse. If you can build and delete one AC raising unit a turn then the apocalypse will never come no matter what anyone does to raise it.

Seems more like an exploit than a strategy.

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Hum. Possibly. The Ragnarok thing feels like it is quite thematic though. Stemming the apocalypse with a river of sacrifices. It's going to require constant construction from one of your military production hubs, or a lot of fussing around in the case of Eidolons.

It's certainly not an exploit if you delete units that actually added to the AC on their creation. If you needed to do a short term fix through gradually depleting stores of Ragnarok units or Eidolons that seems pretty fair.

Production is processed at the end of the player's turn. Units are built and then control passes to the AI. The unit you're talking about building and then deleting will be built as soon as you end your turn, and will exist until after control has passed to you on your next turn. Unless the AC is being processed sometime during your turn this technique won't work.

Are you sure you were exactly one point away from 100%? If you were at 99% on the AC that could be many points of increase away from 100%, especially on a big map. You could have been hovering 5 points away from armageddon, with nothing else happing to influence the counter, and doing your raise-and-lower trick. It might seem to work but not actually be raising the AC enough to trigger anything.

If I understand you, Selrahc, you could use this method to drop the AC from 100 to something you can live with in one glorious slaughter, but you couldn't use it to stop the AC increasing from 'not bad' to 'bad'.

If the AC is at 100 and you produce 70 units in the city with the Prophecy of Ragnarok afterwards, the AC should stay at 100. If you kill them all, it should decrease to 30. I'd like to know if you play tested this, though, as the code might always look like this:

Actual_AC = ∑ events + ∑ units in Prophecy of Ragnarok city + ∑ special units + ∑ various razed ciy stuff + 5*∑ Elegies – 5*∑ Hallowings etc.¹
Display_AC = MIN(100, Actual_AC)

If so, the trick won't trick. (The increase your units made would be there, but hidden.)

Have you tried it out and confirmed it works? Also, am I missing what allows you to use this for anything other than one glorious post-AC 100 slaughter?

¹ It wouldn't read like this: it would read as Actual_AC = 0 and then various lines that increase it.