Free tech with Liberalism

Woo Hoo I've actually discovered a bug, well more of a cheat really.

When your the 1st to liberalism, and you gain the free tech, BEFORE SELECTING the tech, immediately reload a previous save ( I did so as I was aiming to grab steel, and didn't stop at 1 from completion.)

As game reloads, it'll ask you to select free tech, I choose Nationalism, the game continues to load, playing liberalism and nationalism in the back ground.

Once your reloaded game starts, you have nationalism as a KNOWN TECH!!!!

Really, with this 'cheat' which it actually is, you could realistically take Future tech 25 as your free tech, by keeping on repeating this.

Single player, normal speed, Emperor diff>

Can you post a save for me to test it? i wanna have fun with this an I don't have a suitable save to test....

If it is true.... OMG

Obligatory first question: Are you playing 3.17?

Anyhow, I don't understand the timing of this. Once the Choose tech popup comes onscreen, it's the only thing that accepts input so I don't see how you can load a different save. And before that popup comes onscreen, reloading a save didn't do anything for me.

You could just use world builder, it'd be easier.

Interesting glitch though.

Sorry 3.17 version and I'll explain better.

Obtain liberalism, be the 1st one there (duh)

The game congratulates you...then you exclaim "oh crap, I meant to stop 1 short, and reload previous save., don't hit OK till after you've started to load other save.

The game should now prompt you to select your free tech, while reloading, I choose Nationalism.

Nationalism is now a known tech, and you still can research liberalism.

Now this is all contingent on reloading BEFORE selection of tech, and didn't cancel itself out in my game.

Game I was using was actually Lonely hearth Bismark, I was just playing about seeing if I could wonder spam at Emperor level normal speed. Monty ended up taking liberalism later as I was trying to move to chemistry

I don't have a save only the 4000 bc file.

I don't understand the cheat. It sounds just like the way Liberalism is supposed to work. When you discover it, you get Liberalism + another (free) tech the same turn. It sounds like you simply chose Nationalism as that free tech.

Or are you claiming that you don't get Liberalism, and thus can research it all over again? If so, that does sound like a bug, but if you have to keep researching it over and over to get another free tech, it's really only giving you the difference of research points between your "free" tech and Liberalism.

In any case, I'm not understanding you properly.

I didn't think you could do anything while the game was loading...will check this.

I tried it out with my old pre-liberalism save. It wasn't easy at first and I needed 4-5 tries to pull it off.

Step 1: load game with 1 turn remaining to liberalism.

Step 2: end turn.

Step 3: When you get the promt to choose a free tech, don't (open civilopedia to delay the prompt).

Step 4: Finish all other popups, buildings constructed etc.

Step 5: Once only the free tech popup is left, open civilopedia, close it and instantly hit escape. Load the game pre Lib again.. notice the free tech popup is still overlapping the load screen, so choose your extra free tech while loading.

Strep 6: Once you enter the game, you might hear the tech comment before you enter the game proper. You'll notice now that the tech popup of your free tech is there still, carried from your previous game to your loaded one!

Step 7: next turn and free tech again. Or if you really want to exploit this you could save first before hitting end turn to repeat it I suppose.


However... I see no reason to do this, if you want to cheat you can use the WB.

Thanks for the additional information. I'll check it out and see if there's anything we can do about it in the SDK for the Unofficial Patch.

@Friend: the reason it's a problem is because of Locked Modified Assets games where WB isn't available. I've sent a PM to make sure the HoF/GoTM staff is aware of it.

Dresden said:

Thanks for the additional information. I'll check it out and see if there's anything we can do about it in the SDK for the Unofficial Patch.

@Friend: the reason it's a problem is because of Locked Modified Assets games where WB isn't available. I've sent a PM to make sure the HoF/GoTM staff is aware of it.

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Ah I can see how that would be a problem in competitive games. If you need a file where this bug has been exploited (to search for exploitation) I could upload my where I got Economics AND Military Tradition for free.

Thanks. Keep it around; HoF/GoTM staff might want it to help identify exploitation but on my end I just need to learn to get the timing right so that I can hopefully prevent it as it happens. It seems bloody hard to do, but I did finally manage it once so I'll start poking around.

Ummm... unless this is a dead-easy, plain, simple fix, please don't include this kind of stuff in your patch. It's completely unnecessary. If someone has to go out of their way to cheat like this, a patch isn't going to stop them. Nor do they likely want a patch to stop them.

By tinkering with too much stuff in your patch, you risk breaking something else and making things worse. I mentioned this same kind of thing to Solver before he went ahead and started tinkering with the way the AI used bombers and intercept... and he went ahead and broke the AI's use of bombers. :-(

@Woody1: While I understand your position, this situation is obviously a bug. The designers certainly didn't intend for you to be able to do this. It may be extremely rare for one to stumble upon innocently, but if it happened to IPEX, it can happen again. So if I can find a reasonable way to fix it, I will.

I'm well aware of what happened with Bombers since it was the main reason I started working on the patch myself and I do my best to tread carefully on these things. If I'm not confident of the fix, I'll just do my best to convince another team such as BetterAI or HoF to try it out and only put it in the patch after they provide some real-world testing.

Solver made a coding error, woody. His solution was not wrong, he simply mistyped it

On this: This should be some kind of faulty update to the "current status" file ( I'm forgetting the name ).... probably the game is not updating it on the reload because of the pop up. I wonder if this is not dll fixable ......

Dresden said:

@Woody1: While I understand your position, this situation is obviously a bug. The designers certainly didn't intend for you to be able to do this. It may be extremely rare for one to stumble upon innocently, but if it happened to IPEX, it can happen again. So if I can find a reasonable way to fix it, I will.

I'm well aware of what happened with Bombers since it was the main reason I started working on the patch myself and I do my best to tread carefully on these things. If I'm not confident of the fix, I'll just do my best to convince another team such as BetterAI or HoF to try it out and only put it in the patch after they provide some real-world testing.

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Fair enough. I'm just saying that evaluate the benefit:risk ratio before messing with stuff like this. In this particular case, the benefit is very small. So, the risk should be equally low in order to warrant including a "fix".

If you find a common bug that can't be worked around, it's worth taking a bigger risk to fix it. But this particular case is not common, and the work-around is easy. (One has to go out-of-their-way in order to cause this bug to occur.)

Solver made a coding error, woody. His solution was not wrong, he simply mistyped it

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Well, unfortunately, Solver started thinking he was a better coder than he actually was.