How the Caveman cheats

[Caveman1953]

I save the game right before popping a hut. That way I can go back and do it over again until I get what I want which is usually a tech advance.

 

[Sharwood]

That's not cheating, that's commonly used. It does remove a lot of the fun from the game though, which is why the "Preserve Random Seed" option was added to Civ III. Where's the fun in playing if everything's predictable?

 

[Caveman1953]

Fun in playing? No! The fun's in winning!

 

[chieflookout]

It takes a little longer, but if you pop a hut closer to an enemy city than your own, keep going until you get a settler. It's support city will be NONE, and you can use it without food support. This will cause your city to grow faster. Also, bribing settlers later is another way to do this. I didn't think it would help all that much at first, but it makes a pretty big difference in some situations.

 

[ummmm........]

A settler popped from a hut will always be an unsupported, NONE unit. It's military units that get based at the nearest city and therefore become NONE units if the nearest city is owned by another civ . . .

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I save the game right before popping a hut. That way I can go back and do it over again until I get what I want which is usually a tech advance.

I do this, too. The way I see it, it isn't cheating if it's not in the Cheat menu.

 

[BaconLad]

i save the game rite before alot of things, e.g - i take a diplomat to investigate a city, (saving before hand) then after investigating, the diplomat will disapear, so i just load up the game again and hey presto theres my diplomat save and sound.

during wars, i save the game, make peace with my enemys and give them all my tech so they share maps with me, then i load up the game knowing the exact positions of there remaining cities and any units that may have slipped under the radar.

the best is to save rite before an espionage attempt, u can just keep loading untill u get the desired result (walls destroyed/specific tech stolen) and no captured spy, no incident etc...

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I never thought of saving when using spies. I just take potluck.

Very sneaky...

 

[rysingsun]

i totally don't understand people who cheat at solitaire.

 

[simpeter]

Why would the game designers even bother having barbarians come out of huts if it's cool to just reload in order to avoid them? And if it's cool, why didn't they just save us the trouble and put a menu asking what you want from the hut? This must be the peanut gallery.

 

[Sharwood]

That's why in Civ III they added an option which disallowed just this sort of thing. Unfortunately they hadn't worked it out by the time Civ II came out.

 

[Ace]

Why would the game designers even bother having barbarians come out of huts if it's cool to just reload in order to avoid them? And if it's cool, why didn't they just save us the trouble and put a menu asking what you want from the hut? This must be the peanut gallery.

I doubt that Sid and Co. even thought that players would cheat and use the load game function for that purpose.* After all, the load game function was put in so one could save the game and come back to it later since the game usually takes more time than one has available in one session. And sometimes it is good to get barbs from a hut, for example, your transport with a couple of spies is exploring a long, long, long, (well, you get the picture), away from home and you pop a hut with a hoard of barb musketeers or cavalry. You can than buy several none units cheaply.

*Or if they did, it was not worth the trouble to try to preclude cheating.

 

[BaconLad]

Why would the game designers even bother having barbarians come out of huts if it's cool to just reload in order to avoid them? And if it's cool, why didn't they just save us the trouble and put a menu asking what you want from the hut? This must be the peanut gallery.

i dont reload to avoid barbs, i reload to get specificly what i want, and sometimes that is barbs. severel none units on the cheap (with a little help from a spy/diplomat)
if im at war and close to my enemy, i pop as many barb huts as i can and let them run free all over my enemys territory.
early in the game i have even alowd barbs (from huts) to attack my offensive/defensive units, to gain vet status. a vet chariot early in the game can be priceless.

 

[simpeter]

I can see the potential menu here.
Would you like 25, 50 or 100 gold?

 

[Terrapin]

If we had that menu, I am sure someone at Apolyton would have a 50,000 word essay explaining why 100 gold is worth more than a None Settler between the years 4000 BC and 2000 BC!

 

[stixs]

I'm guilty of regulary saving my game right before a lot of things. I especially like to save right before I seige an enemy city; I save, deploy the units adjacent to the city and then if too many of them are taken out before I can attack, I simply reload. Although not technically cheating, I think this strategy is pretty devious and if overdone really does take some of the fun out as well. An exception for ACCIDENTALLY sending triremes into open water on their last turn. I hate it when my mouse slips...

 

[Banach]

Saving before you do something in the game with an unknown and/or random outcome and then re-loading if the desired outcome is not achieved or to garner knowledge one might not otherwise have (such as # of defenders a city has or other information) is directly circumventing a feature designed into the game. Most people would call that cheating. I choose to never do this - this is a strategy game and requires planning. I'm careful about when and where I pop huts and I plan warfare very carefully. The only part I really dislike is early game Barbarians on raging hordes - they can severely hamper your game if they land near you. Mid to late they are very manageable but early game they can be difficult. However, I deal with it - that's the game and that's how we play. For GOTM play, we just have to agree to rules that everyone abides by, and everyone agreed this is a cheat and so shouldn't be allowed. That being said, I think it's not necessarily obvious what was and wasn't intended by the game designers, which is why the agreed upon rules are important for comparitive play. When playing individually, anyone can do anything they want to have fun, including turning on the cheat menu and using it directly.

 

[JAC1]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who quasi-cheats on huts and spies. It might be taking it a bit far to ensure every hut on grassland / plains is an advanced tribe, even when it takes ten minutes, or plant six nuclear devices without getting caught, but when the pleasure you get from it is rapidly turning a savage land into a highly engineered human landscape, rather than faithfully replicating the likely experiences of a given civ, then cheating oneself (the 'cheating at solitaire' alluded to) does not circumvent the purpose, fun, or process of the game.

 

[geofelt]

It's cheating, pure and simple.
It is a crutch for the weak player and deserves no respect.

If you want only good results from huts, don't pop them in the wild. Wait until they are within your city radius.

 

[candle]

honestly thats cheating, you might as well go to the top menu and enable cheats.