Endless poprush with no consequence is a loophole in the game design. So is endless drafting at size 7 with 7+ units of contentment improvement. Neither is realistic, and both offer a high reward wherein the penalty (unhappiness in the city) is defeated and rendered nonexistant by the priority order of the happiness and unhappiness factors. That is, no amount of unhappiness overcomes the contentment factors, so you can endlessly exploit the benefits with no actual penalty.
That's a major flaw in the game, since its exploitation allows the game balance to be thrown out the window, and certain "strategies" rise to the top as too good to pass up.
I think the size 7 factor with workers is also a loophole.
Now I use all three of these myself, the workers the most. I tend not to abuse the poprush, rather to "play normally" with some rushing but then move on in governments and play the game the way it always played in Civ1 and Civ2. Yet I find myself more and more exploiting the draft-rush, and I don't think that's a good thing. It's no better than exploiting the despotic poprush, since both are taking advantage of the faulty happiness priorities. I will probaby cut back on that, or perhaps even eliminate it.
Following the path of least resistance, when it follows a trail down the road of exploitation of game loopholes, is for me a generally self-defeating course of action, which is why I try to avoid it. A game's entertainment value is going to plummet when every game follows the same formula, and the temptations of the exploits become so strong, you find yourself unable to resist them. In that regard, it is wholly like cheating: using some mechanism to defeat the spirit of the game, rather than work to succeed within it.
Yes, there is a certain "hardline competitive edge" (aka Power Gaming) to finding and exploiting every possible flaw in a game design. Yet for all this talk of "reloading = cheat", I haven't seen in this thread yet the mention of "poprush exploit = cheat". That starts to get into a grayer area, no doubt about it, and I'm sure an argument in its defense could be mounted, BUT... I can also mount an argument in favor of the idea, just as the "give away cities" loophole, which has mostly (not entirely) been closed, amounted to a cheat.
I've been participating in the Apolyton "game of the month" equivalent, and avoiding the competition here, because this one seems a little TOO bent toward the scoring system, which offers nothing BUT rewards to the despotic poprush player. It might be interesting to compete with the folks here, to see how quickly I can execute the exploitation strategy and achieve conquest, but I kind of get the same feeling from that sort of gameplay that some of you describe about reloading.
I sincerely hope that Firaxis can work toward plugging some of the game's loopholes without also destroying the good things about the game. That's honestly a very difficult task. Someone here mentioned limiting to one rush per city, and I think that would be most unfortunate. The rush option is a grand addition to the game, and should not (IMO) be removed or rendered useless -- they just need to do something about the player's ability to use it and abuse it at such insignificant cost.
The AI's defense routines also need a lot of work. The AI does not recognize a stack of 20 panzers parked 3 squares from one of its cities as a threat. It is too quick to "spend" its "extra units", and never defends with more than about 4 units in a city. It has no concept of how to use artillery, and only one mode of play for all the civs: expansionist. All it does is try to grab more and more land. It would help with predictability if it had multiple options on hand, multiple priority lists, tactics, unit management. As much AI as there is here, it becomes quite transparent to experienced players, and that's not even counting other game loopholes, such as Right of Passage exploitation, and a diplomatic system with a one-size-fits-all treaty option of 20 turns, which renders most deals useless to the human player. You get rewarded for slimy play (razing cities, starvation of occupied peoples, poprush exploit) and penalized for honorable play (capturing cities, treating occupied people decently, making diplomatic deals, and in the scoring, ALL methods other than ancient warmongering).
This is a really fun game, and it's quite close to being very good, but it still needs a few more tweaks. I sure hope it gets some of them in more patches. So far, my confidence in Firaxis is HIGH, judging from results of their first patch -- and that's no mean feat, impressing me, as I've become highly jaded by the less-than-dedicated results I've seen from other companies.
In the mean time, I've personally been playing lots of "variants", self-restricted scenerios. Someone in this thread mentioned how useful it is to select civs with overpowering ancient UU's. Well what about playing on Emperor/Deity with UNfavorable setups, like civs without such advantages, maps that don't lend as well to ancient victories, self-chosen limitations like limiting poprush or eschewing it altogether, staying in Monarchy governments, limits on brokering, or anything else to vary the flavor of the game, test your skills WITHOUT the easy-out exploits and proven "strategies", introduce new challenges, or just be interesting to try.
One of the reasons I've been drawn to the Apolyton competition is that score is only one of the measuring sticks used there. They give attention to highest score and earliest victory date for EACH victory condition on a map, and that leaves a lot of options open besides just horsie-rush-your-way-to-dominance.
Just a few thoughts from an outside observer.
- Sirian