While I might not agree with everything that shows up here, I like the idea of this thread and its finality a lot; it will tighten up the quality of HoF competition considerably.
Question: should discussion over particular exploits/rules be started in separate threads? Based on past history over the past few weeks, we've good reason to believe that discussion over pretty much anything will cause a massive # of posts, and IMO this thread is best served as an effective final ruling...the "providing info" could really clog this thing up if handled improperly.
So if your luxury trades are broken for any reason, it's game over?
I've come down on the rules pretty hard in the past (and some still need work; that's for another thread), this time I get to defend the rules though
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The clause clearly states that the staff recognizes accidents will occur and that they'll be looking for patterns. Before the other thread was closed Martin Alvito/Myself got into a discussion regarding the enforcement of the exploit clause and he put forth good evidence that the approach we're seeing here is optimal (citing economics as well as basic incentive logic); it's the best way to enforce bans on unsavory practices...anything else either doesn't stop actual abuse or is indeed an instant game over for people playing in legit fashion. You're free to open discussion on this rule elsewhere but IMO it was fleshed out pretty soundly in the other thread that this is the way to go.
In other words, they're not going to ban your game if once every 10-20 games or something a barb pillages your title on turn 17 of a deal, but if you start pushing your luck it's going to be noticed.
I agree with vexing that as long as you don't retrade the resource before the original deal would have expired the game shouldn't be voided. I mean as long as were allowing trades for LS, the gold exploit isn't stopping the trade - it's trading it again for more gold faster.
The problem with this is that you retain the lump sum gold and the happiness once repaired. While that isn't nearly as strong as selling the resource once again, it's pretty strong. It's a compromise solution in a sense but the end result would be to let them pillage you anyway and break the deal...and the whole point of this rule is to avoid shenanigans like that. I also fundamentally don't like using barbs for self-pillage; this is a strong luck factor and I'll argue in favor of ANYTHING that reduces non-decision-based luck in the game. Barbs are already too much luck-dependent IMO, your suggestion makes it worse.
Kevin_J's post is what I was worried about when I made my original thread. The state firaxis left the game in makes this a mess for HoF staff. I can see some merit on erring on the side of caution right now until this forum can help flesh out the rules; wanting to avoid unbeatable HoF results has merit. On the other side we're working against prediction of firaxis, ability to apply rules consistently/fairly/etc, and so on. If 6 pages with only a few conclusions taught us anything, it's that this won't be easy. Rather than abandoning HoF (I've taken a back seat on actual submissions until its position is more clear to me), however, I'd rather see these kinds of opinions expressed more fluently in a separate thread that directs HoF toward actual useful rules rather than strictly hating on the current ones. I've long asked for basis for the current rules; however basis for any amendments to them should be equally required.
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