City state XP farming exploit? You use it?

Joined
Oct 19, 2005
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533
Got an early crossbowman from an explorer, via two lucky ruins. I declared war on a nearby city-state, quickly killed off the two warrior units it had, and then peppered the city itself from a forest two squares away. I'd do a few hit points of damage, it would only do 1 HP damage to me per turn. So that's 4 xp per turn, two for firing, two for getting hit. When my HP would run low, I'd step away to heal, let the city heal, and easily take out any warrior it managed to produce. Did this for awhile, earning two more promotions beyond the two that I had from barbarian encounters. Since there's no xp limit from fighting city states, I'm sure I could have gone on for awhile. But I got bored and decided to sack the city for a luxury resource.

The only draw back was that I angered some neighboring civs for being mean.
 
Not sure how I feel about it as an 'exploit'. I've used it a lot to level up sea units. Seems like one of those things that wouldn't be exploitative if the AI was better. Not sure if they can program in something like "reduced XP for repeated hits" or some bs.
 
Exping ranged units is close to pointless because they will eventually get upgraded to normal infantry.
 
This is so minor it's not worth the time in "fixing", and might break stuff more than it would help by doing so. There's a lot larger of holes out there.
 
Playing Montezuma you can earn culture through a continuous war against city states. Whilst it sounds like an exploit I think historically they did hunt down warriors from other tribes as prestigious sacrifices to the gods. The game may be representing that quite well.
 
Exping ranged units is close to pointless because they will eventually get upgraded to normal infantry.

Not if you make strong advances in the medival era, where experienced range units can make the job super easy.

Crossbow with +1 to range, double attack and ignoring terrain = gg melee.
 
Exping ranged units is close to pointless because they will eventually get upgraded to normal infantry.

Say that to may logistics, indirect fire longbows.

half a dozen of them. They destroy everything in immortal. Rifleman, cannons, EVERYTHING.
 
Lol @ joke OP.

I guess all good tactics are exploits.

Well, if you must, instead of an exploit you could just call it "poor game design" and then you can say: It's the fault of the developers and testers to have such poor game design.
 
It's fault of betatesters they didn't catch those exploits and didn't prevent them one way or another to make the game more challenging.
 
Well, if you must, instead of an exploit you could just call it "poor game design" and then you can say: It's the fault of the developers and testers to have such poor game design.

Except you have to ruin relationships with a city state to pull it off, and for only a so-so benefit.

This game has MUCH more glaring design issues/flaws, but most of that comes back to the emphasis placed on whoring graphics/pretties vs streamlining gameplay so that it can be completed reasonably, which is an unfortunate but necessary catering to the most common purchasers of the game.

Civ V has its goods and bads, but the one inexcusable thing is the bajillion bugs, a good handful of which are "game over" bugs.
 
This isn't even a real exploit really. The time it takes for you to level up your range units this way, you can just use it to take out other civs and level up just the same.
 
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