Pillage, repair, pillage, repair (repeat) exploit

[bonafide11]

I discovered this while playing a OCC game last night. Since in OCC games, it's difficult to come up with gold, after I conquered a city, I'd pillage all the territory around it for the extra gold. After capturing an enemy worker, I realized that workers have the "repair" ability on open territory. So you can have a couple workers continually repairing improvements, and a mounted unit moving from one improvement to the next and pillaging it. It takes some micromanagement and it's an exploit, but it allows you to collect quite a bit of extra gold per turn, which is especially useful in a OCC game. The developers should make it so workers can only repair improvements on your territory.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

I discovered this while playing a OCC game last night. Since in OCC games, it's difficult to come up with gold, after I conquered a city, I'd pillage all the territory around it for the extra gold. After capturing an enemy worker, I realized that workers have the "repair" ability on open territory. So you can have a couple workers continually repairing improvements, and a mounted unit moving from one improvement to the next and pillaging it. It takes some micromanagement and it's an exploit, but it allows you to collect quite a bit of extra gold per turn, which is especially useful in a OCC game. The developers should make it so workers can only repair improvements on your territory.

Well, perhaps the workers can repair "free" improvements only in your territory. Roads need to be repaired outside of your territory.

 

[FeiLing]

Why do you need money if the enemy doesn't have any more units? If it had, your worker would be captured instead of freely being able to repair around his city.

 

[Optional]

Well, perhaps the workers can repair "free" improvements only in your territory. Roads need to be repaired outside of your territory.

Yes, but already you cannot make improvements outside of your territory, with the exception of roads, so for the repair function the same should apply.

In the meantime, better not abuse this. Unless someone finds it really fun to do, the game is about fun, after all.

 

[bonafide11]

Why do you need money if the enemy doesn't have any more units? If it had, your worker would be captured instead of freely being able to repair around his city.

Huh? There's plenty of reasons to need money other than to fight the enemy units. I don't see what the connection is between the two things. This is something that can be exploited after defeating an enemy to make extra gold. With the extra gold, you can buy buildings or units, upgrade units, bribe city-states, etc. that you could otherwise not afford.

As I said, this comes in handy especially in a one-city challenge game when it's difficult to make much money because you can't puppet cities. I don't play multiplayer, but I imagine this could be abused in multiplayer games and it'd be quite frustrating to play against someone who does it.

 

[xxhe]

Actually, I think you spend more money to maintain these workers and units...

 

[Optional]

Actually, I think you spend more money to maintain these workers and units...

It's quite profitable, and you have to keep in mind that you're probably doing this in peacetime, not in the heat of battle.
Everybody will have some units for spare in peacetime.

 

[bonafide11]

Actually, I think you spend more money to maintain these workers and units...

Definitely not true. You can get ~40 gpt by pillaging & repairing with only 2 workers and one mounted unit. Maintenance definitely doesn't cost that much.

 

[Rex_Mundi]

Definitely not true. You can get ~40 gpt by pillaging & repairing with only 2 workers and one mounted unit. Maintenance definitely doesn't cost that much.

True you can get 40, but what do you get on average?
Is there a difference in what type of improvement you pillage?
3 units easy cost somewhere around 10 gpt.

Do you have the policy that makes your workers faster, or do you have the pyramids?

In my oppinion this could be said to be an exploit, but it may not be as profitable as you make out...

 

[bonafide11]

True you can get 40, but what do you get on average?
Is there a difference in what type of improvement you pillage?
3 units easy cost somewhere around 10 gpt.

Do you have the policy that makes your workers faster, or do you have the pyramids?

In my oppinion this could be said to be an exploit, but it may not be as profitable as you make out...

I'm saying on average you can get 40 gpt. Sometimes much more, sometimes much less. But the average pillaging of a tile is about 20gpt, and you can usually pillage two tiles in one turn. You don't need anything to make the workers work faster as repairing a tile only takes two turns as it is. I don't think you can count the mounted unit as someone costing extra gold since it also can serve as a military unit if need be, so the workers may cost an extra 6 gold per turn, and if you are making 40 gpt, that's an extra 34gpt, which can be a pretty big deal. If you don't believe me that it works that well, then just try it.

It's not something I would advocate doing in a traditional game setting because it takes effort and it's not much fun exploiting a broken system. But it is definitely a major advantage and discovering it helped me win a OCC game because it helped me get enough gold to buy off some city-states that were allied with Persia, who was going for a diplomatic victory.

This could also be exploited in a multiplayer game, which would be frustrating to play with someone who relied on some cheesy game exploit.

Simply said, I'm just putting it out here so the devs will fix it in the next patch / expansion. Workers cannot build non-road improvements outside of their territory, so they also should not be able to repair non-road improvements outside of their territory.

 

[headcase]

Well, perhaps the workers can repair "free" improvements only in your territory. Roads need to be repaired outside of your territory.

That's a good idea.

On top of this, a more sophisticated method to prevent two allies "at war" from making gains off of each other is to make it so each time an tile is pillaged, a pillage counter goes up for that tile, resulting in lesser gains as the counter goes up. This would be wasteful on the processor though.

 

[Hammer Rabbi]

i was thinking this about a different exploit. im still wondering if you trade your only lux to someone and a barbarian pillages it if you lose diplomacy with them. will they DoW, denounce, etc?

the last game i played i had 3 spices, traded/sold 2 of them and a barbarian came in and pillaged one. the game considered the one pillaged to be the one i had left and not either of the ones i had exported so i never saw any ramifications from it.

 

[Trik]

Too much effort for such little gain.

 

[zyx]

Now with the patch changes of healing your units, you could attack pillage, repair with worker and pillage again! Awesome exploit!

 

[Cataphractoid]

This is an old thread, but sometimes this isn't just about the money, it's about staying alive. If you bring workers to enemy territory, you can use it to heal 25 points every turn (if you bring 2 workers per unit.) Since you can repair pillaged infrastructure in enemy or unoccupied space, you can mount a long siege and pull back units to heal by pillaging. In the Fall of Rome Scenario, as the Romans/Eastern Romans, late in the game, you are losing massive gold per turn and having units disbanded. Earning gold in this way can save your units from disbandment, or allow you to buy a key unit in a floundering city. In a massive sprawling game, I was able to earn about 500 gold in one turn by pillaging a bunch of tiles. This was enough to buy a courthouse in a recently captured city, pushing me above a threshold where I was losing all my city growth and suffering a massive empire-wide production penalty.
Think of a catapult assaulting a city, and getting 25 points of repair every other turn as it continues to fire, instead of having to pull back and repair at 10pts/turn. This can make the difference between capturing a city in 5 turns vs 25 turns.

 

[Browd]

Moderator Action: Please do not necro 4-year-old threads. If you have something new to say, please do so in a current thread or open a new thread. Thread closed. .