Protective Walls Exploit

[Itachi]

I have heard various people mention a strategy that involves whipping protective walls. What is this strategy and how is it implemented? I would appreciate it if someone could explain it or point me to an article that does.

Thanks in advance.

 

[r_rolo1]

You can give this a look

In a nutshell: whip and chop a pro stone-boosted wall and the large hammer overflow will give you a very useful lump of gold, normally more than 200 on normal speed. Good to support REX.

 

[vanatteveldt]

The overflow money mechanic is that you can only carry over a limited amount of production to the next item, I think the limit is the cost of the first item, and any amount over that is converted to cash

The bug is that this conversion does not downscale production modifiers, so if you have +100% production, 1 raw extra overflow hammer becomes 2 gold

The exploit is to use production bonuses (eg protective walls with stone) and cause massive overflow (eg whip it and chop 4 forests in the same turn). Since you have +200%, the forests are converted into 30*3 = 120 gold each, allowing you to convert forests into deficit research at a very nice exchange rate. The math could be wrong but I'm fairly sure the principle isn't

The obvious bugfix would be to downscale the gold back to 30 each, which is more or less fair money for a forest plus worker turns.

 

[Dresden]

Please note that the newest version of the Unofficial Patch for 3.17 reduces the amount of gold this will generate by removing the "non-generic" modifiers from the gold calculation.
</shameless plug>

 

[vicawoo]

You nerfed protective? Do you also steal candy from babies?

Why not just buff every other trait to even it out?

 

[Elkad]

its not a protective nerf. Sure, they could convert walls to cash better than anyone, but you could do something similar with any discounted building. Or with a high-bonus city building troops. (HE, academy, Ironworks, Fascism, etc)

 

[Gliese 581]

You nerfed protective? Do you also steal candy from babies?

Why not just buff every other trait to even it out?

My thought exactly. You nerfed protective?!

 

[r_rolo1]

Dresden solved a programming quirk that by acident works well with protective walls. I don't know where ppl got the idea that this is a Pro feature :/

 

[vicawoo]

I hear Dresden trips blind people. And steals from the homeless on Thanksgiving.

A video of Dresden volunteering to help children:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlmZFTlOy6A
volunteering to help the handicapped
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqEAjaa0uQs

 

[Bleys]

The main reason this is so "strong" is because the discounted building in question has a resource component as well. No other trait has a resource-reduced double-speed building. That extra + 2X is what puts it into the "exploit" range, but as people have said, PRO is pretty weak as far as traits go, so a little extra bonus isnt so bad. Not like you can do it over and over and over, you get exactly 1 time per-city and its a minor PITA to set up for every city.

 

[semirami]

The main reason this is so "strong" is because the discounted building in question has a resource component as well. No other trait has a resource-reduced double-speed building. That extra + 2X is what puts it into the "exploit" range, but as people have said, PRO is pretty weak as far as traits go, so a little extra bonus isnt so bad. Not like you can do it over and over and over, you get exactly 1 time per-city and its a minor PITA to set up for every city.

Actually there is. Ind+stone/marble. But here you can't covert forest to gold, because wonders are very expensive and overflow will be converted to hammers. It's still very good thing. You can put the overflow to wonder, boosted by resource that you don't have. Example prechop the Oracle and put the overflow into Pyramids. In this case you have marble, but not stone.

I'm not sure, that I like the walls exploit. Sure the gold is nice, but you sacrifice very important early production.

 

[Dresden]

Of all the reactions to Unofficial Patch changes, this is by far the most entertaining. If you want to exploit broken game mechanics to prop up bad traits, you can always stick to the Official version.

On a more serious note, protective walls wasn't much of a consideration behind the change; if that was the only way to exploit this I might not have bothered. It was examples such as building chariots in an HE city that provided more overflow gold than you could get building wealth in the same city that convinced me that overflow was broken. And you can still convert chops to gold this way if you really want to; you just don't get to steal extra gold with modifiers that wouldn't apply to wealth.

 

[carl corey]

I'm a bit confused about the unofficial patches. Is there only one for BTS 3.17? If not, how do I find out which version I have currently installed? I installed Solver's patch after getting BTS 3.17, but I don't remember what version of the patch it was.

 

[Dresden]

There is only one Unofficial Patch (that I know of) for BTS 3.17 but like everything there have been several versions released. The project was started by Solver and reached version 0.19 before he abruptly stopped working on it; but there were some problems with that version, including the major one of AI bombers refusing to bomb anything if there were interceptors around. So I picked it up, implemented jdog5000's fix for the bomber problem and some other smaller fixes and released version 0.19.1. Since then I have continued development and have released version 0.21 and am working on another release as well. I monitor and make release announcements in both the original Solver sticky topic and the dedicated UP forum but it can be confusing since Solver's posts obviously only refer to the older version.

For versions prior to 0.21, there really is no good way to tell which one you have installed (or even if it is installed at all.) Your best bet is probably the last modified date on the DLL. Solver's 0.19 Release had a mod date of 27 June 2008 and my 0.19.1 Release had a mod date of 18 August 2008. Current and future releases have an on-screen version indicator shown when you hover over the flag in the main interface.

Also several mods incorporate (various versions of) the Unofficial Patch changes into their code but that's probably just confusing things further.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Of all the reactions to Unofficial Patch changes, this is by far the most entertaining. If you want to exploit broken game mechanics to prop up bad traits, you can always stick to the Official version.

On a more serious note, protective walls wasn't much of a consideration behind the change; if that was the only way to exploit this I might not have bothered. It was examples such as building chariots in an HE city that provided more overflow gold than you could get building wealth in the same city that convinced me that overflow was broken. And you can still convert chops to gold this way if you really want to; you just don't get to steal extra gold with modifiers that wouldn't apply to wealth.

It's all perfectly clear to us now:

You're a terrorist.

 

[Bleys]

Actually there is. Ind+stone/marble. But here you can't covert forest to gold, because wonders are very expensive and overflow will be converted to hammers.

One of the keys to the trick is that the item you build is a 1-shot deal, not a long build. I am sure there are ways to exploit it though. This just came up in another thread. Do hammers from Wonders decay? If not, can you convert hammers to gold at a pretty solid rate by taking advantage of the multipliers? Can you build the same Wonder in multiple cities and get cash when its actually finished somewhere from all of them? Lots of combos in there.

 

[Iranon]

You can start the same wonder multiple times for cash - and I'm rather fond of doing so. With Organised Religion, Industrious, Forges and a resource, this is a fairly sweet deal. Note that putting additional hammers into them with chopping/whipping is also possible, although doing the latter as efficiently as for walls requires even more fiddling around.

I think the hammers decay like everything else though.

 

[carl corey]

Thanks, Dresden. I most probably have Solver's 0.19 patch, I'll check the date when I get home. Keep up the good work!