I've discovered an exploit

[RedinTexas]

Apologies if this is nothing new.

City management allows you to turbocharge scientific research. The key is that you can cycle through your cities using the left and right arrow keys. You can do this during your turn and also when the program is processing between turns.

When you finish your turn, the program calculates the scientific research first before doing anything with any of the cities. Once that is done it goes about the housework of adding food, shields, and money in the cities. It runs through the cities in the same order every time. Playing the Celts, it does Entremont first, then Alesia, and so on in the order that you built the cities.

At the end of my turn I check my cities to see if anything is 1 turn away from completion. Let's say Entremont is about to build a spearman. I go to all of my cities other than Entremont and change every citizen into a scientific researcher. That runs the research numbers way up. I finish the turn and when the program pops up Entremont on the next turn with the completed spearman, I use the left and right arrow keys to cycle through the cities and change all the citizens back to what they normally would be. After doing so, I continue with the turn changeover as normal and all of the cities get the benefit of the citizens working the land tiles as if I had never changed them to scientific research.

The same thing can be done with other cities finishing a building project, but you can only do the cities that were built after the city in question.

I haven't tried this all the way through, but it's working nicely in the ancient era. One caveat though, is that you have to sure to cycle through the cities to get the people back on the land tiles before continuing on during the turn changeover. If you fail to do this, you lose everything from land production.

TL;DR
Nice exploit in city management to speed scientific research. Again, apologies if this already known.

 

[tjs282]

Nice exploit in city management to speed scientific research. Again, apologies if this already known.

It is already known, and because it is so powerful, such double-dipping has long been banned from submissions to both the CFC Game of the Month and CFC Hall of Fame:

http://gotm.civfanatics.net/games/rules.php
(called the 'Gold Mine' exploit in this list)

http://hof.civfanatics.net/civ3/rules.php?show=disallowed
("Changing Laborers pre-Production Phase")

Feel free to continue using it (and any other of the listed exploits) in your own games, though!

And if you're interested, @Lanzelot wrote a comprehensive rundown on interturn mechanics, which you can find here:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/interturn-mechanics.443195/

 

[RedinTexas]

Yeah, I figured there was little chance that it was unknown.

There is another way to exploit this though. In addition to being able to speed scientific research, it can be used to give two cities access to the same tile. If two cities overlap in their radii, you give the first city access to the tile before ending your turn, and then remove it from production when the city pops up in the interturn, cycle to the second city and give it access to the tile. Two or more cities can use the same tile for food or shield production on the same turn.

 

[Lanzelot]

The exploit isn't that strong after all: once you have discovered Republic and built a library in your town, leaving the citizen on its tile gives you way more than the meager 3 beakers of the scientist...

 

[justanick]

You can also use wealth to double-dip a bit more commerce and then switch to regular production.

 

[Chicken Pizza]

Yeah, gold is calculated first.

I suppose it's because players got annoyed by the opposite in Civ 1 (don't know about Civ 2), where you could lose a city improvement even though your income was larger than your outcome. You had to keep your capital >= your income.

When a technology is two turns away, I put the science slider at 100% and make all my kingdoms citizens researchers.

If the game still says "2 turns to completion", there's not much you can do. If it says 1 turn, I lower the science slider geadually to 0%.

If it still says 1 turn, I start turning scientists into tax men.

Next turn, when your science advisor approaches you, turn luxury up to 100% to get a free turn of happiness, click on a city in the list and rearrange as normal.

 

[templar_x]

The exploit isn't that strong after all: once you have discovered Republic and built a library in your town, leaving the citizen on its tile gives you way more than the meager 3 beakers of the scientist...

in a core town, that is...

There is another way to exploit this though. In addition to being able to speed scientific research, it can be used to give two cities access to the same tile. If two cities overlap in their radii, you give the first city access to the tile before ending your turn, and then remove it from production when the city pops up in the interturn, cycle to the second city and give it access to the tile. Two or more cities can use the same tile for food or shield production on the same turn.

to some extent, this even happens naturally in the game. the reason is the city governor, who rearranges citizens if a pop unit (worker or settler) is built. therefore, e.g., a mined hill could become free. this very hill could be used by another town, growing on the same turn and coming later in the city list. its city governor might or will choose that mined hill on growth then.

t_x

 

[Chicken Pizza]

It occured to me that you can use this to leave olden age in a nice way.

The turn before, the game still counts beakers and shields as you're in GA, but it's not what you actually get next turn.

So you either have to count manually, including corruption, or let it be a mess to clean up the following turn/turns. I usually do the latter.

But this time I had an early city in the list finish something, a musketman instead of a cavalry, then scrolled through the rest.

 

[Chicken Pizza]

Oh, sorry, I get it now.

So if your capital is a 2 turn worker factory, you can do this every other turn.

Building a warrior every turn could also be worth it, you can alway do something with them later.

This is great, especially when not starting by rivers, I have to try this. Thanks for the tip

 

[Buttercup]

There's a gazillion exploits in this game, to the point where some are still being discovered even after all these years.

Take this one I found while playing for a Military victory condition on a huge archipelago map:

I landed a large force on a rival's large island that they entirely dominated exclusively. I then attacked and then destroyed about 5 cities in the middle of the island, rendering a big a gap in their Cultural coverage of the island. About 10 turns later, while I was fortifying my troops in no-mans land in readiness for the next few cities, almost the entire enemy army suddenly marched right past me, as if I wasn't there. They had not only abandoned defending their cities, but they weren't even going for me - it turns out that what had disturbed them so much was that all that no-mans land had meant that Barbarians were respawning again, and if there's one thing the AI can't abide during a full-scale invasion, it's a couple of wandering Barbarians.

That made clearing out the next batch of cities so much easier...

Another reason to always play with Raging Barbarians ticked as your preferred option!