I think someone brought this up before, however, since we are running GotM using G&K I think this should be added to the rules.
In G&K you have to complete the Rationalism tree to get the 2 free techs. However, once you've done so, if you use your next policy to switch to the Piety tree, you'll go into anarchy for 1 turn. On the following turn you can switch back to Rationalism and gain another 2 free techs immediately and have 1 more turn of anarchy. So, if you beeline to the Renaissance while producing as little culture as possible you can then max out your CPT and you'll complete the Rationalism tree fairly quickly, open Piety and start ripping through the tech tree while maintaining very low BPT and not spending any cash on RA's.
During anarchy you don't collect any production, science or gold. However, you do still collect GA happiness, culture, faith and great people points. So you could keep alternating between Piety and Rationalism gaining 2 free techs every other turn until you pop a golden age.
To sum up, I believe this exploit would be far worse than the Oxford University exploit that's already banned.
will this be something that can be seen in game files? recognized on submissions?
We're looking into this in staff.I don't know how these things would look to the saved game parser, but perhaps with knowing what to look for ya'll can teach the parser to find them.
Examples of tactics used:
- Repeatedly selling a resource (luxury, strategic, etc.) and pillaging or allowing Barbarians or other civs to pillage the resource or trade route to break the deal.
- Repeatedly selling a resource (luxury, strategic, etc.) and declaring war or otherwise bringing about a war that breaks the deal. (i.e. a phony war just to break the deal.)
- Repeatedly selling Gold per Turn (GPT) and declaring war or otherwise bringing about a war that breaks the deal. (i.e. a phony war just to break the deal.)
- Repeatedly selling Cities and declaring war or otherwise bringing about a war so you can take them back. (i.e. low risk, low cost war just retrieve the cities for resale to another civ.)
Why aren't these included in the GotM rules?
The bottom line is that we are in sync with the current HoF rules.
However, without a mod, this really is not a competition as nothing is enforceable. We describe what we are trying to achieve in the TSG series of games in this thread.
Hopefully, as Civ5 matures, we can do a better job of defining rules and hosting a "real" competition.
edit - Also thought I should add that we should be pushing the software some to see if we can discover where there are exploits. When we create the mod, we can often correct exploits to some degree. No mod though until the .dll file contents are released.