FLEECING the AI for gold!

Talking about exploits...I wander, I googled it and saw it's mentioned only few times ever....Liberalism bug. I found out about it in my 2nd or 3rd game and tried it once again to see if it'll work again. It did. I don't want to explain how it works, but I wander how everyone didn't find it, early on, when you didn't know what is what? Or is that only my version of game that is bugged? Or everyone uses it and doesn't want to talk about it? LOL I didn't use it after and will not use it again.
 
It's banned in any competitive forman that takes itself seriously (years ago when I saw it I immediately xposted it in SGOTM, XOTM, and HoF I believe), and most of us who have been around here a few years have read about it and know the gist. It works with oracle, too.

Needless to say, if you're going to bother doing that crap you might as well just use worldbuilder.
 
You mean taking several techs with Liberalism?

Right now I am experiencing different bug with Oracle/Lib. If my autosave is exactly on the turn of Oracle built/Lib discovered when I pick free tech it says something like "You already got free tech", something like that, don't remember exactly, and does not let me have my free tech at all, forcing me to reload autosave turn before. And if I don't have save on turn before Oracle/Lib... :(
 
It's banned in any competitive forman that takes itself seriously (years ago when I saw it I immediately xposted it in SGOTM, XOTM, and HoF I believe), and most of us who have been around here a few years have read about it and know the gist. It works with oracle, too.

Needless to say, if you're going to bother doing that crap you might as well just use worldbuilder.

Not that I play those formats, but good! In those games you have to post your saves, so ppl in charge can check your logs, codes or whatever...I posted it almost immediately as well, after one test. (It wasn't IU90!) It was weird to find only few evidences about it...In my 7 games so far, I still haven't built the Oracle, so I don't know about that. But yeah, it makes sense. And about wb, I hide minimap and AI's with paper sheet when I add techs to barbs LOL I wish I wouldn't have to do that at all tho, I hate those kind of shady activities.

You mean taking several techs with Liberalism?
Yes. I don't know about your other bug. Its weird, if everyone knows about it, why it wasn't fixed with some patch?
 
It's from the unofficial fix from BULL I believe (and hence, BUFFY).

Wadayousay without BULL, I would get another free tech upon reloading? :dubious:
How on earth could Firaxis leave it unfixed?!

I'd say big thanks to Unoficial Patch team, but err... wasn't there a way to fix this horrid bug without making another one (it ruined me at least 2 games, when my last save was exactly on lib date...)?
 
This side-effect only screws up autosaves. Once you've already made your Lib selection... it's saved. (provided you saved manually, that is)
 
I need a new PC LOL I installed BUG cause it doesn't slow the game...and K-mod for the same reason, but I'll learn without mods first. BULL or BUFFY are 300mb+ or so, so I believe they do slow the game down. I don't want to install the game on laptop cause it's for work only, so I play on single core relic from college days LOL
Well GK, you could save manually 1 turn to Oracle/Lib.
 
Ohh right :) Sorry to get out of topic, but since we're here...Now I remember - I had that dl'd already, and I didn't install BULL cause I was not sure where to install and didn't want to mess up. Are those newest versions? This is save I had from before, so this is succession game and it works like it should? Shouldn't I have the option to Heal+Sentry? And why is turn counter dead? I had turn counts, and in between % of game completed. This part in blank now. And what happened to Scoreboard? These options are all default?
Spoiler image :
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You can change BUG Mod options in the BUG Options menu: Ctrl+Alt+O, or click the praying mantis in the top left. If I recall, the turn counter and percent complete etc. are under the Clock tab.

I can't say for sure why Heal+Sentry isn't there. Either it's another thing you can enable in the options menu, or perhaps it was removed as I have a feeling it caused OOS errors in MP.

As for scoreboard, what are you asking? Are you talking about the overlapping, or the fact it has more info?
 
Doh! :) Heal+Sentry isn't there, it's in Optional folder. I think. For the reasons you mentioned. Found the scoreboard spacing option...there's a lot of options there! :D And turn option, its disable NJAGC to show turns all the time. How was I suppose to know that? LOL
 
For those saying this subsidy exploit is minor or only works at high level and large maps, either you dont understand how it works, or you are being downright miss-leading.

I just tried it in a pretty tipical game. Noble level, standard size map, standard size speed, and with NOT optimizing everything, since this was a quick test from an old save. The game started with 6 opponents, two of which were already dead.

I was able to get 160 gpt from these 4 AI, and with some pre-planning and optimization, this could have been been pushed to 200 gpt. This was without paying a single turn of the subsity, by pillaging to cancel it immedietly.

To put 200 gpt in context, it was the different between running the science slider at 100% instead of 70%... This translates to about 700 beakers per turn in a typical space-game around the time of electricity.

That seems like a significant amount to me!
 
Jastro: Time of game, your size vs theirs, and what resources you had to trade to get all matter in context.

Overexaggerating the :gold: ---> :science: returns doesn't help your cause one bit. Even if you have research labs and free religion most cities aren't getting over 110% multipliers.

So give us year/date/resources traded etc. I'm not interested in deals that lower your :) or :health: cap, since those are generally more harmful than helpful if you're not getting double digits on them.
 
I dont know the exact year, but I had research electricity (I was using Aluminum as the pillageable resource). This was a space race game.

My size was about 20 cities, and I was researching at a clip of about 2300 bpt, so 30% would be 700. I know realize however that some of the 2300 was comming in from speciallist (I am guessing maybe 200 of that, so maybe it was closer to 600 beaker per turn value).

I did NOT lower my happy or health cap with this, because I had extra strategic resources, and coulf use those to trade for a Happy + ~9gpt in one deal.

I was in the process of getting research labs up, so they were about half up. The capital was also my main science producer. It was Beuracracy with Lib+uni+lab+oxford+acad...

Actually, I will just go back and do it now, so get exact numbers...
 
So, I did it again, and this time got 212 gpt from the trick.

You were right that I was overestimating the research. 212 per turn was indeed worth 30% on the slider, and the total research was about 2200, but more of that was comming from specialist than I expected (I had forgotten all the GP I had settled in the capital). Bottom line, the 212 gpt translated to just under 400 beakers/turn. Still, I would consider that quite substantial.
 
So basically you were huge, somehow had ai with lots of pop to make trades, and around twenty resources they didn't have? Odd...

I dont think it is odd at all. It is pretty common in most of my games (which tend to be space races). Pretty much standard for a space race on anything other than Pangea type mapes, is that you take your continent and then turn up the research. In this case, it is bery common to have an excess of 30+ resources, and the AI do not need to have very large... These had about 10 cities each, which I would think is pretty typical for the mid-late game.
 
If the AI wants to give so much gold for a resource and is only limited by not having enough gold to give, then helping them find the gold to do so seems reasonable to me. Is it any different than getting a lot of gold for an old tech from an AI that just raked in a lot of gold from a failed wonder build? You can even donate some Stone or Marble to help this process along if you want.
 
This feels really exploitative. Some of the tactics that we commonly employ may be a little shady, but not to this extent. This isn't "helping them find the gold," it's tricking them into thinking they have a ton of free cash flow when they do not. The more money one has, the more money one will spend. That's common human behavior, and while the AI clearly is not human, this at least feels like rational behavior to me.

This also is not comparable to selling old techs to the AI for their FG. This would be more like tricking the AI into thinking they had 500g and selling them tech for all of that gold, while in reality they had no gold and went into a large deficit after the trade causing a strike.

I won't be using this personally, at least not in any forum games where i share and compare my experiences with other civ players.
 
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