Firaxis broke and then restored the effectiveness of spread culture missions. You cannot deduce from that that they were aware that spread culture missions could, in addition to their traditional uses, be used to obtain a cultural victory in the manner that Kaitzilla has demonstrated.
I can't 100% guarantee they knew, but I'm pretty sure. While the speed at which kaitzilla managed this victory is new, the concept itself is not new. It dates back quite a few years ago; in fact I believe their patch work on this mechanic arose *because* of a specific CFC post highlighting the potential of this mission, and then they changed their mind after making it non-functional. I would have to go back and look at the old CFC posts when this mechanic was pointed out years ago. A submission like this has been 4 years coming or so. Regardless, it would be silly to assume the opposite and that the mechanic directly goes against their intent even more so.
It seems highly implausible to me that Firaxis intended the fastest way to win culture to be one that doesn't require building any cultural buildings. Why, if that was the intention, would all the mechanics to win culture by the traditional methods be in the game at all?
You could say this about things like modern armor, the time victory condition, and victory condition balance in general. Did firaxis intend for AP wins with 0 civs running the AP religion? They never changed it though. Did they intend for war to dominate in the base game to such a large extent that military requires absolute focus for survival in MP? Maybe, maybe not.
I'd be willing to accept the idea that they didn't realize that espionage could beat out pure
for the
victory condition, however I'd also posit that
as a victory condition is imbalanced in the first place, requiring far fewer resources to win any anything but AP abuse (which is a quesitonable mechanic unto itself). I can win culture a good % of the time on deity with 3 cities if I can avoid war, mostly by mashing end turn. Was that intended too?
What is the HOF mod? It's code that fills in stuff that Firaxis didn't do, but which needs to be done in order to run a competition! So fixing stuff that Firaxis haven't fixed is something we already do (admittedly, for security and UI, rather than for game mechanics). So I don't think you'd have much of a case for saying that in principle we should not 'try to 'be Firaxis' when it comes to fixing other things that Firaxis have missed.
There is a difference between fixing things, and becoming the design team. If you change the game too much, HoF starts to become a new game. Virtually everything else banned are tactics that go beyond exploit and into the realm of "glitching out the game for advantages that circumvent the mechanics". Infinite techs and war success are a good example. I would argue that HoF's valid basis for banning such things is
not that they're against developer intent (even though they probably are), but rather that they break competitive balance to an unplayable degree. I haven't seen any evidence that espionage breaks that competitive balance. It instead allows one mechanic to replace another for one VC...or possibly it's a new VC. That depends on your guys' choices.
I'm not sure what you'd count as a competitive-balance reason. In the end what I'm concerned with is trying to ensure that the (GOTM) competition remains fair and that as many people as possible can gain maximum enjoyment from it.
You could make either choice (new VC, letting EP = Culture win) and it would be "fair" insofar as it's a tactic that has been open to everyone across almost every BTS version and is reproduceable.
For competitive balance we're looking to avoid situations that overcentralize how the game is approached or glitch it out to the degree of trivializing player choice. I would argue that both culture and EP approaches are pretty centralized, but as STW pointed out the extra flexibility in a espionage based approach might actually make the faster finish times more competitively interesting as the tactics that can be a serious factor are more varied due to not having to commit almost from t0.
I suspect one problem is that, if you see the game as a mathematical problem to be solved in as few turns as possible, then you'll likely see the espionage tactic as being legitimate.
There is no denying the game is numbers at the fundamental level. That has been the winning approach to HoF for years, and not just in
. Take Jesusin's
guide however; he basically flat-out tells readers that doing some computation is necessary. He's right, too. Even "traditional"
requires micro optimization and planning to reach the fastest times it can allow. How is that different from espionage then? In fact, planning/mathematics is a core element in strong play in this game. The vast majority of its mechanics are deterministic (combat being a rare exception). Farms are always 3
. Grassland river mines are always 1
3
1
early on. Whipped population always counts the same, etc. That's how the game was designed.
If on the other hand, you see the game as an (admittedly, very imperfect) way to model the actual rise and fall of civilizations, then you're more likely to see the espionage tactic as an illegitimate exploit, and to feel cheated if your (traditional) culture victory is beaten by use of it.
This is one of the more absurd things to consider, and yet I see it argued often anyway lol. How would a "civilization" in real life "win" a culture victory? Civ truly was designed as a strategy game first. You see it in the fixed tech costs, in the tile yields, and in the consistent way the vast majority of the mechanics function, none of which model historical fluxuation whatsoever. You see it in 1 leader ruling for all of existence. RNG combat does a poor job of reflecting combat, but we don't have a tactical layer and so they chose that route (a mistake IMO). Regardless, the vast majority of the game's core mechanics, not to mention its premise of playing for victory conditions, have nothing to do with historical simulation. The ultimate victory in human civilization is survival and improvement of quality of life, but in civ we have pre-defined conditions.
Now, what does HoF do? It measures how quickly people reach victory conditions (turn count), or how high of a score they attain. These things are *not* historical simulation outcomes (I wonder what, say, Mongolia's score is right now
), they are literally number goals, and you reach number goals via planning and doing some math. That does *not* change between "traditional" culture games and espionage culture games; only the output symbol and
investment is different between the two.
mechanics (i.e. how much 
