Is Palace Jumping an exploit?

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

Originally posted by wilbill
Webster's gives two definitions of exploit. Some of us seem to prefer one over the other.

1 : to make productive use of : UTILIZE <exploiting your talents> <exploit your opponent's weakness>
2 : to make use of meanly or unjustly for one's own advantage

If, as some people seem to feel, #1 is an exploit, then there's really no point in playing the game. If everything that makes the human better than the AI is an exploit, then just flip a coin instead and save yourself the hours of gameplay, because that's really what it comes down to. If you can only be exactly as good as the AI and no better, then there's no way for you to win other than pure random luck.

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

I should add that I do think palace jumping is an exploit. I just don't think that in general anything that gives the human an advantage is an exploit. So then what makes palace jumping an exploit?

The best definition I've seen of an exploit is something that a human player would learn from but the AI doesn't. An example would be using mutual protection pacts to suck the AI into a war. A human might fall for that once but not a second time. The AI will fall for it over and over.

That still doesn't really cover palace jumping though. I think you need to extend the definition to include using bugs or unintended features. Palace jumping is an unintended feature. It's there because if your capital is captured or razed, your palace needs to go somewhere. Deliberately abandoning your capital city takes advantage of that logic in a way that I think most of us can agree probably wasn't intended by the game's designers.

Worker management and micromanagement of citizens don't qualify as exploits by either of these definitions (but both do by the "anything that gives the human an advantage" definition). A human opponent wouldn't see how you're handling your workers and your cities, so a human wouldn't be able to learn from your expertise any more easily than the AI can. Furthermore, the ability to manually assign tasks to your workers and to micromanage your cities' population is clearly designed into the game.

 

[Rellin]

I'm sure intentionally disbanding your capital to move your palace was not an intended function by the designers, therefore you can safely consider it an exploit by players to cheat the games intended mechanics.

Though what I do not understand, is that this has been going on for years now, and still has not been fixed when many other less exploitative ways to beat the game have infact been fixed quite quickly.

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

Originally posted by Rellin
Though what I do not understand, is that this has been going on for years now, and still has not been fixed when many other less exploitative ways to beat the game have infact been fixed quite quickly.

How would you suggest fixing it? I suspect that's the key problem. The palace does have to go somewhere, so there's always a way to take advantage of that.

As an example, someone suggested that they could change it so the palace moves to the city nearest to the original capital. That would certainly make the jump more difficult and would prevent you from jumping it to another land mass, but couldn't you just create a "trail" of closely-spaced cities and abandon each city in sequence to move the palace where you want it? It would cost you more settlers and take more effort, but it would still work.

If there was an easy solution, I'm sure they'd implement it.

 

[Rellin]

Disbanding all those cities would probably cost more then it was worth, though Im not sure as I have never used this exploit or messed around with testing it.

I'd say the easiest and more logical way would just to make the capital non-abandonable, and you can't abandon it through making workers or settlers as well, but whatever, I am sure the game designers, can come up with thier own ideas, as that is what they are paid for.

 

[Yumbo]

but couldn't you just create a "trail" of closely-spaced cities and abandon each city in sequence to move the palace where you want it?

Let's keep this in the realm of reality, no?

Actually, disabling the palace pre-jump would be as easy as making it impossible for people to abandon the capital city of their empire. If you can't disband your capital, you can't do the palace pre-jump. You still get the benefits of superior palace placement in case of a capital being conquered (probably more important for the AI; the human player can recover from a sacking better than the AI can), but limit the ability of the human player to cheat immensely.

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

Originally posted by Yumbo
Let's keep this in the realm of reality, no?

I'm not sure it's totally unrealistic. Certainly you're not going to move your palace 50 tiles away via a trail of abandoned cities, but you could get a pretty nice 10 to 15 tile move with 5 settlers. That's cheaper than building it manually, and if you have a good settler factory it's faster too. With the latest changes to C3C you wouldn't want to move your palace farther than 15 tiles anyway.

Actually, disabling the palace pre-jump would be as easy as making it impossible for people to abandon the capital city of their empire.

That seems like a better solution. I don't think there's any good reason to allow abandoning the capital. You could still probably play some tricks by leaving your capital undefended and goading the AI into capturing it, but that's something where if you can pull that off properly you deserve the benefits. That seems more in the realm of strategy (not necessarily a good one ) than exploit to me.

 

[binyo66]

Originally posted by Dr Elmer Jiggle


How would you suggest fixing it? I suspect that's the key problem. The palace does have to go somewhere, so there's always a way to take advantage of that.

As an example, someone suggested that they could change it so the palace moves to the city nearest to the original capital. That would certainly make the jump more difficult and would prevent you from jumping it to another land mass, but couldn't you just create a "trail" of closely-spaced cities and abandon each city in sequence to move the palace where you want it? It would cost you more settlers and take more effort, but it would still work.

If there was an easy solution, I'm sure they'd implement it.

There is a simple solutions. If the capital was razed or captured by enemy, then move the palace to the better location (not the nearest city from old capital where enemy is there). Otherwise, disable the menu

From reading this thread, I am still in my position that moving the capital is our right (but not disbanding). I usually use GL for building the palace. However, the area that I choose is ussually very far away and alone, so it's an exploit though (with my current version), and true, I build my FP next to my old capital (again, I am agree that it's an exploit).

 

[mihoshi]

I think that moving of capital is entiraly legal and realistic. For example, Russian capital was first Kiev, then Moscow, St.Petersburg in times of Peter the First and then Moscow again.

Japan moved capital from Kyoto to Tokyo.

Alexander the Great set the Capital of "Makedonia" in one of conquered nation's capitals, I don't recall details.

Egyptians also changed their capital in ancient times.

Capital aka Palace is administrative center of the nation. And in Civ3 it's place does really matter. So, moving of capital to more suitable place is really natural.

 

[Yumbo]

Moving and jumping are NOT the same things.

Yes, moving one's capital is and should be entirely legal.

Palace jumping is a technique discovered by an over-zealous player wherein you exploit a knowledge of the inner algorithms used to determine where your palace would be placed if your capital were disbanded. Usually, you build an FP right next to your capital, then DISBAND YOUR OWN CAPITAL purposefully in order to slingshot your capital half-way across the globe to the city you have artifically built up to be your new capital.

Palace jumping was more useful before the various corruption bugs were put in place. Still, it can be a game-turning cheat, and gives the player a huge and unintended advantage over the AI.

IMHO, palace jumping palace pre-building are the two most substantial and most widely acctped/used cheats still in the game.

 

[mihoshi]

What do you think about removing palaces from the game and giving effects of Palace to King unit? So, king may go and smite corruptioners by him/herself But when he/she is not around...

 

[Matthevv]

In my last game I carelessly let the AI capture my capital, and was left with no capital at all until I built a new one using a GL. I was a bit surprised about that, as I expected it to jump to somewhere else. I looked at all my cities one by one but none of them had the star next to them.

 

[Qitai]

Do you have a save of it? I would like to see it if it is happening. Also, what version are you playing?

 

[Kemal]

Contrary to most opinions here, I'm personally very happy that the palace jump exists in civ3. I agree that the designers probably did not design the way the palace moves once you disband/lose the old to be used by players to get another core up and running in a very short time, so one could call this an exploit yes.

However, there is one thing I find to be a very positive aspect of palace jumping, which is that it dramatically reduces the factor "luck" in the game. As I've been playing almost exclusively competitive games for the last few years (be that gotm or PBEM), I know it can be very frustrating if you can't compete/keep up with your fellow competitors due to a streak of bad luck, and I welcomed the discovery of manually set-up palace jumps very much.

Since it is almost never a good idea to build the palace/FP in a far away place by hand, obtaining a leader to rush it can dramatically swing the balance of the game without the players actually having a large influence on it. Being able to move the palace from a rotten location if no leader arises is something I find to be a very good thing in terms of game balance, and is something that could possibly help prevent cheating in competitive environments.

 

[SirPleb]

I don't think there's anything bad about the Palace jump technique. I agree that it is an exploit in that:
1) The designers probably did not intend it to be a useful game element.
2) The AI can't use it.

But neither of those things is necessarily bad. If we eliminated everything with those characteristics from the game, the game would become much less uninteresting I think

I think that a technique is bad for the game if it is imbalancing. I.e. if it is strong enough that it outweighs other techniques, thus reducing strategic choices and making the game less interesting. I don't think the Palace jump is imbalancing.

I wonder how many people have voted on this poll who have never done a successful Palace jump? If you haven't done a Palace jump then you shouldn't rush to judge it - it isn't a trivial thing to do. It takes a fair bit of work to set up carefully and to make a jump pay off. There are compromises involved in doing it. E.g. you have to deliberately keep your population down in most of your cities (which forces your hand in other aspects of your strategy.) And you have to choose between rushing an early settler to a distant and initially non-productive location, and then boosting the size there with workers, or going to an early war to capture a good FP location. The longer you delay these things, the greater the impact on your original core because you must keep limiting population growth there. An additional tradeoff is against a tight build, for the same reasons (limiting population growth.)

I can't comment on MP in this regard but in SP games I'd say that a Palace jump is not even a good thing to try on most (i.e. over 50%) maps. On many maps, the things you have to do to set up a successful jump will cost you more than the resulting benefit.

All of these things add up to me to make the Palace jump an interesting game element, and one which enriches the game by providing one more viable strategy. A strategy which has costs as well as a reward and where these elements are balanced enough (even though this is by chance, not by the developers' intent) that it enriches game play by providing an interesting choice.

And BTW, all this is moot in Conquests in the latest FP implementation (patch 1.15) - with the model used in that patch there is little value in moving the Palace at all in most games. (Not in jumping it, and not even in moving it by building or rushing with a leader.)

 

[Muldoon]

Re Palace jumping - I cant get it to work on my current HOF game at Chieftan level. I have built up a city on a distant island, it has more population than any city I have but when I abandone my capital the palace jumps to a city near my FP every time even tho this city has a smaller population.

Am I missing something or does this possibly not work at Chieftan level - Sirpleb your wisdom is needed here!

PTW - latest version, btw

 

[Longasc]

Palace jumping is an exploit! It was never intended to be used this way.

It is unnatural and artificial, exploiting the game algorithms to get an advantage you would not have gotten otherwise, because you

-> have no Military GL
-> did not invest a lot of time in building it


I think the solution is rather EASY:

Usually you sacrifice with your capital a very well developed city.

How about making the Palace very CHEAP, so that this whole city disbanding strategy becomes uninteresting?

I want to comment on SirPleb'S statement, that is true but I cannot agree with it:
"All of these things add up to me to make the Palace jump an interesting game element, and one which enriches the game by providing one more viable strategy."

I think it adds a very artificial option, like the former Ring City Placement, that gives the game rather the charm of an Excel-Spreadsheet-like game, e.g. Stars! if you know it.

For me, palace jumping is not even an option - I do not raze my starting Capital, this would be against my sense of "ingame" tradition, heritage and so on and really diminish the flair of the game.

Ugh. Me spoken.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Originally posted by Muldoon
Re Palace jumping - I cant get it to work on my current HOF game at Chieftan level. I have built up a city on a distant island, it has more population than any city I have but when I abandone my capital the palace jumps to a city near my FP every time even tho this city has a smaller population.

It is not just the largest city that gets the palace. It's a formula that includes the population and the number of cities near it. If you look in the strategy articles forum or the war academy you might find an article about Palace jumping that explains the formula in detail.

-

Palace jumping correctly and efficiently does take skill. Anyone can jump a palace somewhere, but it takes skill to know when to do it (and when not to), get it to where you want it to go, and to be do it early/at the right moment to make it a good move. Worker farming correctly and efficiently also takes skill, but it also is exploiting game mechanics (taking a citizen from one city that needed only 20 food to make the worker and adding it to a metropolis that needs 60 food to grow). But more people seem to accept the worker farming than palace jumping. Go figure.

Although few would admit this, from my observations, the meaning of an exploit is:

If you like to use it= Not an exploit
If you do not like using it= Exploit

 

[Longasc]

An exploit is clearly defined:

You make use of certain game mechanics to get an advantage that has never been intended to be.

e.g. Buying something cheap from a merchant in certain MMORPG's and selling it back to the same for a higher price and so on.

e.g. Palace jumping in Civ3.


But since it is not an MMORPG, I do not mind if people cheat or not... an exploit is also the less serious variant of cheating.

Some reload, some palace jump... this is their decision.

But it still is CHEATING and EXPLOITING.

 

[SirPleb]

Originally posted by Muldoon
Am I missing something or does this possibly not work at Chieftan level

Click here for the article Bamspeedy referred to. It explains the formula used which includes factors for native population, foreign population, and number of other cities nearby.

Originally posted by Longasc
An exploit is clearly defined: You make use of certain game mechanics to get an advantage that has never been intended to be.

Definitions of exploit are very slippery. Most have loopholes. Here's an extreme example with the definition you just gave: We now know that the Forbidden Palace in CivIII/PTW was much stronger than the designer intended it to be, its strength was unintended and a bug. By your definition that makes every Forbidden Palace built in any game played before the Conquests release an exploit. That's silly of course. And that means there's a problem with this definition. Another and more common problem with this definition (which is a popular one) is the endless debates which occur about what was intended to be. When I've seen such debates it usually seems to me that the debators are taking it more seriously than the designers ever did. It is usually just the users who want support for their own point of view that think the designers actually had a master plan and a particular intent, and that it is important to know what it was

Bamspeedy's definition of exploit a couple of posts up is the first one I've seen which seems to work very well.