The Mechanics of Overflow Inflation

Paszczak said:

What's the point of super early Artillery or Tanks if it takes 30 turns to build one and you don't have enough at this point to rush buy even one? I can see people using this exploit for nice and easy science victory, but for domination that is not nearly as dramatic as y'all make it look. You can have all the in the world but if your and are tight domination is going to be a slow grind it normally is.

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I literally couldn't finish Science Victory with the game I played - I didn't have good infrastructure and it took 40 turns to build a part in any of my cities. I could, however, still make stealth bombers at a pretty good clip, and could even buy one right off the bat.

Let me tell ya, stealth bombers are pretty good when the rest of the world is still rocking muskets.

I've had no problem pushing a tank army out on t150 or an artillery army out on t130. It's just a matter of amassing gold and either pre-building units to upgrade or rush-buying.

For upgrading, full liberty plus right side honor.

For rush-buying, full liberty plus Mercantilism->Big Ben->(plus Mobilization for Tanks). This option works way better with the Maya than anyone else though. Extra GS, GE for Big Ben, GM for cash, GW to speed through Commerce, GA to boost production/culture/gold, GG to immediately acquire oil/etc.... Then just build armories along the way, boom, you're golden. For anyone but the Maya Big Ben is much harder... you need to either rush-buy a workshop to get the GE points in time or rush-buy a university and use liberty finisher to get the GE. (Two slots is better than one)

Otherwise you're waiting on Big Ben. Hence for most civs the honor track is better.

I've done this multiple times both ways. It's no problem if you plan ahead, and are efficient with spending. Time your friendships to expire at the right moment and trade everything for cash shortly before you DoW. Then re-trade with someone else after you DoW. Instant cash.

One pt in tradition is worth it IMHO to save money on tile purchases, but you need to ally a cultural CS or Mercantilism will be an expensive policy.

The key to this is recognizing what you can skip building or buying. The Liberty/Honor approach is much simpler if you're good at early warfare, because you don't need barracks and can start pillaging for gold/getting XP for your troops long before you upgrade them. If you want to get maximum friendship for trading/RAs/whatever and not attack any civs, you can subjugate a CS. Let them make tile improvements and then just level up your horsemen/catapults/whatever while amassing gold from pillaging. But, of course, for optimal victory it's best to capture a few capitals by t130.

The advantage to the rush-buying approach is not paying maintenance on that army the whole time. But you run great risk of being DoW'd running 4 CBs until t130. So you have to be ready to handle that.

For a Science Victory, a similar principle applies. Timing and planning ahead matters. Big Ben + Mercantilism is still a valid approach. You want to fill out Rationalism as much as possible, but the bigger factor will be how quickly you can get research labs and public schools up. So population + money. You're going to need to rush-buy a lot of buildings in order to get real benefit out of this exploit. Use the exploit to bulb Plastics as early as possible, save your GW to get Worker's Faculties, start building factories ASAP, and you're on your way to an early science victory. Again, this works better with the Maya. Their UA is front-loaded. You get most of the benefit from their UA before t150. This is why they're so effective at this exploit. GE for Big Ben to save tons of money on rush-bought buildings will help a lot. As an alternative, give open borders to the civ with Jesuit Education and don't found your own religion, just save tons of faith. That's probably the optimal path, but it's much more map-dependent. I would probably consider it worthwhile to DoW just to snipe a prophet or missionary to make this happen.

Regardless, if you want to finish before t200, you actually have to be good at planning ahead. Think of it this way. It's really no different from an optimal science victory in that you're burning through techs so fast you'll be challenged to keep up with production, gold, faith AND culture. You need a lot of all of those to complete a SV by t200. So you MUST be super efficient with your hammers/money. In other words, the better you are at Civ, the more you get out of this exploit.

Well I tried this with Korea and bulbed 2 great scientists. Pretty soon I was over the limit and I was making - 170.000/turn and archaeology was taking 2000 turns. You can still steal techs to get out of this kind of situation though.

So you should be careful not to go over the limit. It can happen pretty fast if you go through a lot of very early techs.

A friend of mine who goes by the name Suthiro the Master has conjured this little homemade patch to ensure that none of our players can abuse this scientific slingshot. Perhaps you guys will find this useful.

Unpack the archive in your Assets\DLC\Expansion2 folder, replacing the existing dll-file with the new one. I have no idea how that would work with any other mods and/or Steam - so use this at your own risk and make backups.

My 2 cents. I did some testing on request, here are the results:

Science Overflow Without GS Bulb (Scholars In Residence - Active) - http://youtu.be/gKRncn_vbm0

Science Overflow With/Without GS Bulb (Scholars In Residence - Not Active!) - http://youtu.be/djnAlxZJCIA

Science Overflow With GS Bulb (Scholars In Residence - Active) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaVN...st=PLgYopQWwsyjG41klZaOVjtuCQ44yiEnvV&index=2

Best Wishes,
Yoruus

I'm sure I have experienced this overflow research "bug" in the past. I just thought at the time I didn't understand some part of the mechanic. Playing on higher difficulties I often beeline certain techs allowing for the circumstance many times.

Yoruus' videos show it can occur in ANY situation and not just with "Scholars in Residence" enacted.

Could the AI unintentionally utilize this overflow research as well?

JeffreyLXV said:

I'm sure I have experienced this overflow research "bug" in the past. I just thought at the time I didn't understand some part of the mechanic. Playing on higher difficulties I often beeline certain techs allowing for the circumstance many times.

Yoruus' videos show it can occur in ANY situation and not just with "Scholars in Residence" enacted.

Could the AI unintentionally utilize this overflow research as well?

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Probably, but case 1 [normal research] would be extremely rare since the AI favors somewhat balanced trees and not waiting so long that not only is the cheapest tech down to 1 turn but so is the tech beyond it.

As to case 2 [bulb GS], AI accidentally doing this is actually somewhat high if the AI gets a GS late. (Or at least would be if the AI had used its first few for academies to drive up the late game bulb rate)

I've tried this strategy twice, once with Babylon and now with the Netherlands. I wanted to try them because they are my least favorite civ and I thought it might be fun to slingshot with them. I don't mind this overflow problem, it is actually harder to get the hang of and takes hours to set up with all the time inbetween turns. When I did it without SIR passed I think my max beakers was at around 100k before it started to decrease. I went up to Particle Physics and after that it took a long time to build the parts for the ship. This time I went liberty and ended up bulbing 2 scientists at the same time and watched the overflow get out of control. I guess I could of researched alot more of the cheaper techs instead of bulbing right away. Anyway by the time I got to Chemistry I was over the limit. Kind of makes me think of pinball when you hit the machine too hard and it tilts. I put two pics of my game where I gave it up at turn 170. I only grew my first two cities to 5 pop and the other two to 3 pop. I was about 25% behind the leader when I started the overflow before Tilting. Anyway if your not going to get into the math you might want to stay away from passing that bill all together, I do not think it is necessary. ( Both times were on standard/standard/Pang Map/8civs,16CSs ... I started bulbing around turn 160 with the Netherlands and when I did it with Babylon it was around 150 or so since I couldn't get SIR proposed, however with them I had 3 scientists to start and picked up a 4th in middle. However that game I had the low production and finished a science vict 305 turns. )

Fluphen Azine said:

I've tried this strategy twice, once with Babylon and now with the Netherlands. I wanted to try them because they are my least favorite civ and I thought it might be fun to slingshot with them. I don't mind this overflow problem, it is actually harder to get the hang of and takes hours to set up with all the time inbetween turns. When I did it without SIR passed I think my max beakers was at around 100k before it started to decrease. I went up to Particle Physics and after that it took a long time to build the parts for the ship. This time I went liberty and ended up bulbing 2 scientists at the same time and watched the overflow get out of control. I guess I could of researched alot more of the cheaper techs instead of bulbing right away. Anyway by the time I got to Chemistry I was over the limit. Kind of makes me think of pinball when you hit the machine too hard and it tilts. I put two pics of my game where I gave it up at turn 170. I only grew my first two cities to 5 pop and the other two to 3 pop. I was about 25% behind the leader when I started the overflow before Tilting. Anyway if your not going to get into the math you might want to stay away from passing that bill all together, I do not think it is necessary.

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were you playing standard speed? keeping the pop so low and reaching the max that early has me thinking epic speed? what turn did you start the bulbing/overflow?

Hammer Rabbi said:

were you playing standard speed? keeping the pop so low and reaching the max that early has me thinking epic speed? what turn did you start the bulbing/overflow?

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I edited my original post since I forgot to put the settings but yes I was on Deity stand/stand/pang map etc. I haven't slept too much the last few days since Im having fun playing around with this. It's a very odd way for me to play and I find it tricky. Im messing around with it in MP as well duels and 6player ffa's. However I find that it hurts my game in MP. It doesn't bother me using it in MP because I feel its fair for anyone to try it. I don't feel it breaks MP because MP doesnt play like deity SP stand/stand pang map. It's really hard for me to stay behind in tech in MP and hope someone doesn't run me over. Anyway Im off the subject here and these are only my opinions. I tried it again with only one bulb and one city in between France and England, ran into the same problem, I did get all the way to Atomic Theory. I have a bunch of pictures and Ill put the story togther on here soon. This time I did save the game before I started to bulb so I guess Ill retry it from that point and take some more 1 turn techs before I bulb.

I hope Im not showing something that someone already posted. I read a post a day or so ago that said you don't need to bulb to get this going and I've seen that in my own game. Here are two pics of my last try, one with bulbing one scientist and one without. Both times I went over the limit. Pretty funny actually, Im gonna try a 3rd time from my turn 171 save after SIR passes. Im pretty sure you can finish the tree without bulbing now. I was having a ton of fun with this game in hopes I could win without reloading. It was pretty intense being right next to France and England but it seems since I got 1 caravan in each and put them to wars I had no problems. I did build some archers and researched construction down to 1 turn incase of a war. Turns out I could of just researched construction and other techs as well. ( I never bulbed a a scientist on the third try and I made it up to stealth bombers and mech infantry. I think if I wasn't gunshy about going over 210k I could of made it through the tree. The highest I let it get was about 110k. It's pretty easy once you realize you have to go higher up the tree and back down again and over a few times so you don't get over the max. So when you do it don't just do all the cheap techs first or you may run over. )

On Deity, I hit printing and put up a scholars resolution. All the AI's were in to industrial before the Scholars vote and had delegates. The AI overwhelmingly voted my Scholars resolution down. Maria had 8 delegates on nay.

Usually Ai Civs dont care about Scholars in residence that much - I mean they usually dont vote it down. And you dont even need scholars in residence to abuse this bug.

They REALLY should fix this.

Browd said:

Just tested this the same way Moriarte did (used IGE to give myself 3 GSs), but without Scholars in Residence. As is typical on Deity, I was 7th in literacy (33%, 7% behind the leader), with just over 300 bpt. Bulbed the 3 GSs, generating about 6000 beakers. After sequencing the lower cost techs, I peaked at 16,400 of beaker overflow, which was enough to take me to Radio. This is broken even without Scholars in Residence. Can only imagine what Babylon could do with this.

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Hello Browd,

What is "IGE"?

And, it is VERY important to know that you don't need Scholars in Residence to make this work. You have given me the idea to try this with Babylon, as it seems to be THE Civ to use for this technique.

Regards,

Marc

IGE = InGameEditor mod. It's in the Steam Workshop and in the Creation & Customization forum here at CFC.

Note that this beaker overflow mechanic is so obviously a bug and so game-changingly exploitive that it's banned in Game of the Month and HOF submissions and I suspect it's often "house rule" banned in MP games.

Browd said:

IGE = InGameEditor mod. It's in the Steam Workshop and in the Creation & Customization forum here at CFC.

Note that this beaker overflow mechanic is so obviously a bug and so game-changingly exploitive that it's banned in Game of the Month and HOF submissions and I suspect it's often "house rule" banned in MP games.

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Thank you for the information, Browd. I would guess other exploits are banned, too, such as the trade-modify one.

Regards,

Marc

I think that to fix this they should really go back to just having the GS give you one free tech with no other bells and whistles. And maybe to patch away the problem of you spamming your way to the info age, they could make the tech randomly chosen from the techs that you haven't discovered and you have the pre-reqs for.

Trackmaster said:

I think that to fix this they should really go back to just having the GS give you one free tech with no other bells and whistles. And maybe to patch away the problem of you spamming your way to the info age, they could make the tech randomly chosen from the techs that you haven't discovered and you have the pre-reqs for.

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Bad idea; I think RNG already plays enough of a role in this game. Many strategies would be broken, such as beelining plastics/satellites, and getting the late-game techs efficiently. You want nanotech? NOPE biology. And people can just reload to get desirable results. It would mess up HOF and GOTM - people could have finished faster if game favored/disfavored them, and this element could certainly make or break your game much more than random combat damage, barb camps, ruins, or even bad starts.

Trackmaster said:

I think that to fix this they should really go back to just having the GS give you one free tech with no other bells and whistles.

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Not a bad idea. Alternatively, they could just cap science overflow. You don't even need a GS to abuse this unintended mechanic.

Trackmaster said:

And maybe to patch away the problem of you spamming your way to the info age, they could make the tech randomly chosen from the techs that you haven't discovered and you have the pre-reqs for.

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Civ4 had the predefined list of what tech you would discover based on what techs you already have researched.

This added an extra layer of strategy, but was probably considered too complex a mechanic for the average gamer and was cut in the effort to "streamline" the game.