Deity No-exploit challenges

[BlackWizard]

I open this thread to see if people have interest for exploit/abuse free hard deity challenges. Map should also have otherwise harder than starting locations etc. than normal deity starts.

First we need to define what tricks fall under exploits.

I would ban at least following tricks:
-Early worker stealing from AI(Should we ban also stealing from CS?) What is early worker stealing? Before turn 30?40?50?60?
-Pillage-repair-heal
-WLTKD- DOW
-Sell luxury-pillage
-Bribe player A to war with player B then immediately DOW player A

Should all of these be banned? What else should be banned?

Because there is already other Deity Challenge series running very often I dont know if people have time to this?

For those who post other Deity Challenges do you have interest to make every 3rd or 4th challenge exploit free or would it better to keep them totally different series?

 

[Fluphen Azine]

Heck make it really hard. Do not allow the use of spies, no road building, no improving your hexes except for resources, No Trade of any kind, Only Internal Trade Routes allowed, No bulbing any GPs, Not allowed to use the hammer overflow exploit, Not allowed to upgrade your units... only allowed to instant heal... No moving and shooting in one turn, No RAs, No Bribes of any kind, No DOFs. That is all I can think of for now. I'll try to come up with some more rules that you can implement or not, your choice of course!

 

[BlackWizard]

Only Internal Trade Routes allowed

Wouldnt it be harder in long run to allow only external trade routes? External trade routes are good in very early game in deity but otherwise internal are better if not going for cultural

But I think your post is otherwise just sarcasm or something. Bulbing GPs on other hand if you have to bulb them immediately when born and not stock pile 10 scientist...

 

[Fluphen Azine]

I am just sarcastic in general but I would play something with a bunch of rules. I find it to have less immersion for my game experience but I think I am one of the more active players on this site (not so great... I have been averaging 45 hrs a week for years now), so if you start making a bunch of rules and post up maps ... most likely I will join in the fun. I dunno about the trade routes though. Either way make it one or the other or none if you really want to make it hard. Of course that would mean you wouldn't have to build any caravans or cargo ships so it might make it easier on your B.O. It is your choice. It doesn't have to be as drastic as I am suggesting but when I think about it I do not know where to stop when I start making rules. I either want a game with no rules or a game with as many rules as I can think of. I am the type of player who most likely will find an exploit that is not listed. Most likely I would go with 2 cities and find a way to make the AI DOW me and go on a rampage!

 

[IronfighterXXX]

I would ban at least following tricks:
-Early worker stealing from AI(Should we ban also stealing from CS?) What is early worker stealing? Before turn 30?40?50?60?
-Pillage-repair-heal
-WLTKD- DOW
-Sell luxury-pillage
-Bribe player A to war with player B then immediately DOW player A

Before I got obsessed with fast finishes I already had 100% win on deity so to make things harder I played with all this rules + trade only item for item with AI (eg lux for lux, embassy for embassy) It's easy doable

Heck make it really hard. Do not allow the use of spies, no road building, no improving your hexes except for resources, No Trade of any kind, Only Internal Trade Routes allowed, No bulbing any GPs, Not allowed to use the hammer overflow exploit, Not allowed to upgrade your units... only allowed to instant heal... No moving and shooting in one turn, No RAs, No Bribes of any kind, No DOFs. That is all I can think of for now. I'll try to come up with some more rules that you can implement or not, your choice of course!

building road as exploit? (because OP ask for no-exploit challenge).

However I'm sure that in current state of game when you can win using 'great' small piety strategy it's all doable

Only don't know how to force people to respect those rules (and not sure if you find even one person who want to play with them)

But probably you just was ironic

 

[Fluphen Azine]

Sure roads can be an exploit! I like using Glory_7s strategy of building roads everywhere so my troops can move in and out of jungle/forest and get in and out of the hot LZ asap! LOL at your comment on Small Piety Strategy! I haven't tried that yet but I could see myself one day trying it, the problem for me is I do not want to let the AI get 20% ahead of me. That is a bit drastic even for my play style. You just have to play on the Honor System with something like this because nobody is going to check your last turn save file like in GOTM/HOF. Reloads are the worst on these threads because you have no way of knowing who is and who is not reloading although I trust most of the players on here!

 

[stormtrooper412]

All of those were more or less enforced in the Babylon DCL and, if you roll a good enough start, anyone can scramble a win, even me

Speaking of those rules, I didn't actually ever use 3 and 4 but those are good ideas all of them

 

[Tabarnak]

These are not ''exploits''. It's part of the game but i understand that these things shouldn't be allowed, at least a few with a 1 time chance only. Why just don't follow NQ mp rules?

Trades:

Of course humans naturally don't allow gold for luxs. Only lux for lux. Don't trade anything else for gold unless specific situations like direct help to maintain ennemy from your borders. But the AI is clueless about these ''smart'' trades.

So generally only lux for lux trade.

Steals:

Well, again, it's naturally a lot more difficult to steal a worker from a human. It is allowed, but for the sake of sp rule we can just assume no worker steal from civ AI at all.

1 worker from a cs max. Immediately make peace with CS to avoid free XP.

Pillage-Repair:

Banned from NQ.

Bribing:

This part is not obvious. First of all there are some ''bribing'' from humans but it's often in special case where a runaway go too much crazy and it's all doe without specific trade. So, for sp rule, why not just bribe AI against top production leader ONLY?

-------------------------------------

With these settings you can be sure that the deity level will sudenly be harder due to more turns needed to self build workers and generate gold but cerainly doable in most cases. And, of course, no reroll or reload at all...you play what you got.

 

[LordBalkoth]

These are not ''exploits''.

More abuses, yes, not exploits.

Of course humans naturally don't allow gold for luxs.

Why not? If someone is offering me 100 gpt for a lux and I have a spare, it'd be kind of silly not to take it.

Obviously the point at which this makes sense varies depending on era and number of players (much less willing to trade a lux for gold in a 1v1 compared to an eight player map), but why wouldn't this be allowed?

 

[IronfighterXXX]

Why not? If someone is offering me 100 gpt for a lux and I have a spare, it'd be kind of silly not to take it.

I don't play MP but I can imagine if someone is giving you 100gpt for lux next turn you will get DOW ( lux neded for WLTK)

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

Actually I think some combination of a "casus belli" set of war rules, plus rules on CS abuse, plus anything banned in NQ (repairing hostile tiles) can be quite sufficient.
By casus belli, I mean, you pretend there are casus belli conditions (a prespecified and decideable set of them) , and if you ever war without them, you cannot make peace with that AI. Ever. Or rather, this might be extended to be rules for declaring peace, which is more general. It's pretty easy to specify what a phony war or trade-DOW is for each enumerated case of abuse, so you can just rule that the AI won't make peace with you after you pull that .


I've been considering CS abuses and drew up these principles:

If you declare war on a CS, you may not make peace in any of these conditions:

• Your military unit is inside CS territory and you have attacked/destroyed/enslaved one CS unit or attacked a CS city during this war. (sovereignty)
• The CS has a unit within 2 tiles of your city and that city is not at full health. (ambition)

And foremost, you may not make peace if you attacked/destroyed/enslaved one CS unit or attacked a CS city during this turn.

But ignoring the above, you may make peace with a CS if the City-State declared war on you. And all of this only applies to the CS screen "Make Peace", not other causes of peace. A city bombard isn't relevant to these permissions.​

Other principles can be imagined, but I guess these three are the minimal set for making CS abuse just regular old abuse of a non-major. Notably, the CS having units inside your borders is irrelevant. They're still pushovers at heart.

I find it weird to ban XP wars with CSs but not with players. I'd like to have had no XP from bombarding the defenseless city, but that just can't be done, so I permit both. In actual fact, it is my belief that NQ rules on CS abuse are too restrictive being my reason I couldn't continue with that league. (Well, that belief, and the inability to have a dialogue about the rule that wasn't dripping in venom!)

 

[LordBalkoth]

I don't play MP but I can imagine if someone is giving you 100gpt for lux next turn you will get DOW (lux neded for WLTK)

Then I still get 100g out of it and I (and others) will know not to trust that person. And people like to gang up on untrustworthy jerks

That said, I could easily see situations where you may have some end game large happiness problems (like if party A was providing luxes to B but then A decides to conquer B -- suddenly B is willing to pay a lot to C to try to fix happiness and hold off A) and be willing to pay 50 gpt (when you have like 500 gpt) for a lux -- specially since if you're unhappy you're already getting a gold penalty.

[*]Your military unit is inside CS territory and you have attacked/destroyed/enslaved one CS unit or attacked a CS city during this war. (sovereignty)

I like this kind of idea. It makes me wish the AI would do sort of the same thing -- if you steal an AI's worker early on, they should, at a minimum, demand a worker back in return or the gold to rush buy it. Obviously you can't trade a unit in the trade window at the moment so it probably would need to be the latter.

This gets blurrier during an actual war of conquest where you're conquering cities and will be stealing/destroying cities/military units/civilian units. In that case it wouldn't make sense for the AI to try to demand compensation for everything they lost.

 

[tombakerwho]

If you crush the AI with ideological pressure, forcing rebels to spawn, and then repeatedly build caravans and send them in to be captured, just to generate more and more rebels until the AI collapses, is that an exploit?

Because if it is, then we are going to have to make a pretty comprehensive list of rules before I would ever be allowed to play in these challenges.

Otherwise, it is Heathen Conversion, here I come

 

[Shark Diver]

My thoughts on "exploits" always seem to revert to the question on whether it is historically accurate.

Worker steals are certainly historically accurate. Cheap and free labor is what built almost every great civilization in history. It fits the game theme very well.

Unfair trades right before a DoW? Absolutely this has been the case throughout history. Definitely not an exploit.

Pillage/repair? I can even make a case for this.

Now bribing an AI to war with someone and then declaring war on the civ does not meet the standards. Any real civ would not be beholden to the 10 turns of war in such a situation.

There are probably a couple of other "exploits" that don't meet the historically accurate test, but most do. Of course, units that last for eons kinda kill my argument, but I'd kinda miss my upgraded units.

 

[tombakerwho]

In all seriousness though, trying to add extra rules onto a game that already has a lot of rules, does not sound that fun to me. So, I would definitely not play such a challenge, as I have the most fun in the game finding creative ways around problems. Trying to legally analyze these creative abuses of the AI would sap the fun out of it for me.

But, if these rules make the game more fun for you, then enjoy

I just think that using the science overflow exploit before it was fixed was a real exploit, as there was clearly a bug in the code. But, this list of rules sounds more like you are trying to level the playing field for the AI, which is already given tremendous starting advantages. If you want to play against a smarter opponent, play multiplayer, or lobby Firaxis to create a difficulty beyond Deity. But, expecting the AI it to be as smart as a human is unrealistic.

@Shark_Diver

Agreed, most of these "exploits" are real things that happened in history and fit the theme of the game.

 

[Acken]

I think you'll spend more time trying to define what is exploitative and what isn't than playing with that kind of thread.

Just post a map and ask people to play it without the list of behavior you don't like. You'll see if there's interest or not at that point.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

Unfair trades right before a DoW? Absolutely this has been the case throughout history. Definitely not an exploit.

That's not an exploit. What is an exploit is the AI ever at all somehow forgiving this.

 

[Shark Diver]

That's not an exploit. What is an exploit is the AI ever at all somehow forgiving this.

May I disagree? All of Europe has stabbed each other in the back countless times in just the past few centuries…..yet here they are now, supposedly happy as pigs in slop in the EU.

Japan and the US? Best of friends.

Mexico and the US? Numerous exploitive trade deals, yet they are also supposedly good buddies (although I'm sure Mexico views this differently).

 

[Lord Yanaek]

Abusing the AI is doing something the AI is unable to do and unable to defend against.
The AI is unable to play well and have no chance against someone playing well.
Stop abusing the AI, stop playing well.

 

[JeSuisNapoleon]

I feel I am alone in this but:

-Sell luxury-pillage

this is the only thing in that list I consider to be an exploit.
I am pretty sure the AI does all of these things, just less effectively than a human player does.

to make up for the AI's lacking ability to abuse those "exploits", its get huge bonuses on Diety that help it make up for its inability to abuse the player.

The biggest exploit of all is the ability to DOW a CS on turn 2, and stay at war all game long to make sure your units all have 4+ promotions. That should come with a suitably large diplomatic penalty, and it does not. Its also not in your list. Why not?