Exploit: Trade a city one turn before raze

[Azzer]

If you set a city to razing, and wait until it is pop 1 (so about to be razed on the next turn), you can then trade it with the AI (and grab all sorts of things, from gold, resources, make the AI declare war on someone else - I've managed all of these in tests. Ignore the AI when it says "There is no way to make this work", just click propose they tend to accept even though they said there's no way to make it work, if you're trying to give them a city).

End your turn, and immediately the city completes it's razing process and is destroyed - you've just conned the AI

 

[The_J]

Example save please.

 

[glaivemaster]

Hm, I thought things happened at the beginning of your turn now, rather than at the end. Maybe I'm wrong but that's how it seems to work for me

 

[Azzer]

Hm, I thought things happened at the beginning of your turn now, rather than at the end. Maybe I'm wrong but that's how it seems to work for me

I've played games where it doesn't happen - not sure if this is down to the civ you are trading to or not (eg - if they don't have enough excess happiness/gold to maintain the city, or if they would have razed it if they'd captured it themselves). But in a large marathon game last night, I managed to trade 6 cities in a row to Montezuma (the largest empire below me) that I'd just taken from Darius - each time I set the city to raze, waited for the size to hit 1, then traded with Montezuma to get what I could - in each instance the city remained in "raze" state, and burned to the ground when I hit end turn (but I got to keep whatever I'd traded in for the city). I've also played a "quick" game where I tried to trade 3 cities the same way to Washington, but each time the city instantly lost it's "raze" status (ie - the trick failed).

I'll see if I can find a guaranteed way to reproduce it (eg a specific set of circumstances/game speed/a specific state the recipient civ is in), and upload a save when I do, if nobody else beats me to it.

Example save please.

Don't have one handy, I only came to post it after I finished my last game When I play my next game I'll do it again and keep a save.

 

[playshogi]

Just happen to have a save that you can use:

1) Tlaxcala is at or near pop 1, so you can try to sell it, to Songhai who has boatloads of gold.

2) This city also has a trade route to my capital without a harbor, not sure how it's doing that. There are some roads leading to the enemy capital. Maybe it's connected to a Songhai harbor, but as far as I could see all roads went through Aztec land.

3) Also, I'm still getting 2 happy from social policies (piety), even though I revolted to rationalism a long time ago.

 

[Petek]

I loaded the save file, but a city named Tlaxcala isn't available for me to trade. Is this the right file?

 

[factorial]

Hm, I thought things happened at the beginning of your turn now, rather than at the end. Maybe I'm wrong but that's how it seems to work for me

The problem is that things happen at the beginning of each civs turn. The players turn is always first. If I raze City A, it will go down in pop at the start of my turn. If it goes down to 1 pop, then I trade it to Civ X, it will go down in pop again at the start of their turn, potentially razing it to the ground before Civ X has a chance to cancel the razing. It won't happen 100% of the time, but I have a theory on that as well. Razed cities do continue to grow, and a traded city being razed will often grow for ultimately the same reason that this exploit works. The underlying problem is that any given "thing" relating to a city will happen once per civ turn instead of once per game turn. So a traded city will both grow and raze twice in a single game turn. Once at the start of the players turn before they trade it, and once at the start of the AIs turn after it was traded.

I don't have a save handy, if no one beats me to it I can upload one when I get home tomorrow.