Well, Mr. Qitai, or, should I say "Bobby Oppenheimer"?
This is probably the biggest, juiciest, most delicious bug ever found in Civ III. Now that I understand it (Alex's help, his thread updated to reflect this thread's discovery, and I quote: "Qitai discovered that there is a bug in the rank calculations for cities closer to the Forbidden Palace than the Capital. In short, for such a city, the rank is given by the number of cities that are closer to the Capital than that city is to the Forbidden Palace."), maybe I can start playing the game like an experienced gamer.
Okay, I lied. I still don't get it.
But still, this is a huge thing, and congratulations on discovering this. To make an analogy, this discovery is to Civilization III what the formulation of the theory of relativity was to physics. As far as my opinion is concerned, only Alex's murderous dissection of the corruption patterns and David's development of the RCP ranks as high.
(this sort of reminds me of the tech tree- Alex's corruption begets David's RCP, which begets Alex's palace jumping exploit. The three together are more akin to Chaos Theory than anything else, I think
)
Someone please tell me, because I'm dialup and it's a damn imposition to even be surfing these boards, let alone downloading GOTMs, if I got this right:
I build rings around my Palace, then, on an iceberg deep in enemy territory near the further of the two poles, I found a city and build my palace there.
After that, I build a forbidden palace where my regular palace was, and poof- no corruption.
I know that's not what's been discussed here, but I'm asking if that would work.
Anyway, as a newb here, I must say that I'm impressed with the sheer number of graduate-level students occupying this board and sharing conjecture and hypothesis on a simple, profane
video game of all things.
If this sort of dedication was focused elsewhere
well, maybe it's for the best that all you guys aren't primarily concerned with things like politics; we'd probably end up with a technocracy in a decade.