Banned Exploits - Question & Answers

[Zlither]

In an attempt at this month's minor, noticed something that could be an exploit: if you keep missionaries in every city, then (except when a caravan renewal causes a vacate), no new missionaries are generated. This will allow saving more faith points until later when you can buy scientists/... instead of missionaries.

In the game I'll submit (if ok) a lot racked up (didn't know what was happening), but before it could be used, moved the missionaries out, draining the faith. Tried another game where the counter got to ~ -30 (?) which probably resulted in an extra great scientist.

Ok/not ok?

 

[Denniz]

hmm, not sure. What do others think?

 

[vadalaz]

For what it's worth I couldn't even recreate this glitch, not sure I understood how to do it correctly though.

 

[Blatc]

It would be worth looking at specific numbers on the missionary thing. Is this strategy significantly stronger than planting 1-2 prophets?
I'm assuming that by "no new missionaries are generated" you also mean no prophets are generated; I haven't tried to recreate this scenario.

 

[Zlither]

Attached are two screen shots (of a dummy game) to give an idea.

To do this, select "buy missionary" in the "Your religion" tab and put a missionary in each city as they are born. Once every city has one, after a while you'll get a number like -20 or -50 (at least in EUI) for the number of turns until the next missionary is bought.

So no more missionaries (or anything else) are bought with faith. When you get to SR, you can then change the what-you-want-to-buy to "Remind me later" and start with lots of stored faith, where otherwise you would have had to buy missionaries/inquisitors or GPs with the faith.

Not sure what the max I was able to store up this way... think it was something like -50 turns. Assuming high faith production (multiple desert cities), this could be (very, very aprox) 10-15 missionaries @ 400/missionary =~ 4000 extra faith. In the attached shots you can see the ~1400 stored faith.

You do give up the use of the missionaries (not to bad at lower levels) until SR, and you do have to pay maintenance for the missionaries, so there is a tradeoff. But that much extra faith could be worthwhile.

If not allowed, the game that I did submit will have to be checked/possibly invalidated - not sure if I did this or not (didn't submit the game that was originally planned).

On the lowest levels, it's easy to do - convert whole map, then spawn inquisitors (which also work) for you cities, then save up faith.

Guess you could even use the missionaries once, then bring them back, so get some use out of them.

Spoiler pics :

20180807232822_1

• Zlither
• Aug 8, 2018

20180807232839_1

• Zlither
• Aug 8, 2018

 

[vadalaz]

Okay, I can confirm this works, and it works with workers sitting in the cities as well. I assume any civilian unit would do the trick, so you don't have to actually spend faith on missionaries.

If you're doing this to prevent GPr spawning, at most you gain the faith cost of the GPr minus the faith you'd get from planting a holy site. So if you're preventing a 1200 faith prophet and estimating that the game will end in about 60 turns, you gain over 800 faith this way. I can see how this could be crucial for games that require you to spend a lot of faith very shortly after you reach Industrial era, like fast DiploVs or Futurism CVs and to a lesser extent SVs.

Jesuit Education might be quite powerful with this trick, as you need a ton of faith accumulated at Education and Sci Theory. Having each city produce a worker to take the civilian unit spot isn't too bad when you don't have to hard-build universities or public schools, plus you get those production boosts to shrines and temples.

 

[Sir Bugsy]

Perhaps I haven't looked hard enough. Do we have a list of acceptable mods? I have been looking at info addict, but I'm not sure if it is legal for HOF games.

 

[aafritz17]

Perhaps I haven't looked hard enough. Do we have a list of acceptable mods? I have been looking at info addict, but I'm not sure if it is legal for HOF games.

There aren't any mods that are acceptable for HOF play.

bc1's Enhanced User Interface (EUI) is the only "addition" to the base game that is allowed. See this post for the statement that EUI is okay.