Quirks, Exploits, Loopholes, IMBAs: Any I Have Missed?

[Browd]

Workers and other civilians dont give trespassing penalty with CS. Only military units

Right you are. My bad.

 

[Nares]

Browd/Phillip: Please explain how the "Production Overflow" is accomplished.

It would be the same principle; use production modifiers to grow production overflow by dumping that overflow into builds which require fewer hammers than the overflow provides.

However, I believe production overflow is capped by some percentage of the current build, so it can never actually grow to the obscene amounts research overflow is capable of reaching.

 

[Browd]

Here is a 2014 thread on hammer overflow, with links to earlier discussion:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=527304

 

[redwings1340]

Instead of selling strategic resources to the AI in bulk, you can sell them to the AI 1 at a time for 2gpt. So, ordinarily Greece may pay you seven gpt for five horses, and not accept anything higher than that, but if you sell them one at a time in five separate trade deals, you can get 10 gpt for those horses.

This is very useful when your economy is struggling. It's also terrible programming.

 

[Nares]

Instead of selling strategic resources to the AI in bulk, you can sell them to the AI 1 at a time for 2gpt. So, ordinarily Greece may pay you seven gpt for five horses, and not accept anything higher than that, but if you sell them one at a time in five separate trade deals, you can get 10 gpt for those horses.

This is very useful when your economy is struggling. It's also terrible programming.

It has its drawbacks. It'll value the first few at 2gpt, but can fall to 1gpt or 0gpt pretty quickly. If it has enough of its own sources of horse, it may not even be interested. Not all AIs will buy as many individual horses as Alex, warmonger that he is and with a horse UU.

 

[lindsay40k]

Mug a CS to steal their Worker early on. If you're not going to milk them for XP & GG's, kiss and make up, wait 60 turns, pledge to protect, send a kill team to whichever encampment they want clearing, have their old Worker dance in front of the encampment, and score about 100 influence for clearing it and returning the civilian the *ahem* evil barbarians kidnapped.

 

[tetley]

Lindsay you're brilliant. Just not sure how to make the worker dance. Or at least how to keep track that that's the one.

 

[Redaxe]

Lindsay you're brilliant. Just not sure how to make the worker dance. Or at least how to keep track that that's the one.

In fact if you let barbs capture a CS worker you have 2 options.

1. Capture the worker without hurting CS relations.
2. Let it return to near the encampment (adjacent another barn unit), liberate it for 40 exp then wait until the barbs capture it again & get another 40 exp. Easy!

 

[beetle]

Or at least how to keep track that that's the one.

That is the trickiest part. On another thread with this idea, OP said it was easy since all his workers came from the same CS!

 

[lindsay40k]

That is the trickiest part. On another thread with this idea, OP said it was easy since all his workers came from the same CS!

Hah! I never have much trouble keeping track of who's who. Keeping them working specific areas, say around a hill or one side of a river or a set city, generally does the trick.

 

[lindsay40k]

In fact if you let barbs capture a CS worker you have 2 options.

1. Capture the worker without hurting CS relations.
2. Let it return to near the encampment (adjacent another barn unit), liberate it for 40 exp then wait until the barbs capture it again & get another 40 exp. Easy!

Oh, this is killer. Works best if you can barricade the Worker and make sure it can't get away. In fact, if you have two mounted units (the mobility enables you to effectively barricade), you can get a useful CS permanently allied by slave-raiding them and marching their worker over to an encampment then playing pass the parcel XD

 

[phillipwyllie]

If you use EUI you can rename your units.

 

[Jaybe]

If you use EUI you can rename your units.

If you use EUI (Enhance User Interface) then hovering over the worker will reveal its civ of origin!

 

[DarkestOnion]

I tend to draw a Line of Ethics on Game Exploits myself. I find that the best litmus test of whether a tactic (especially in MP) is ethical is how much rage it might induce if it was used against me in game. If the answer is rage-quit level...then I do not do it. Here is a short list of Ethical/Unethical from my subjective opinion.

ETHICAL
Honor Farming barbarians (w/o presetting Raging Barbarians)
Worker Stealing (only Ethical on Emperor+)
Bringing a 'Combat Engineer' Worker to War to Fix Pillaged Tiles to Re-Pillage them.

UNETHICAL
Selling Luxuries to an AI to drain their Gold, DoW'ing to get your Luxuries back.
Beaker Overflow (any Math Exploit because some people cannot understand what you did).
Building Oxford, Selling the City, and Rebuilding Oxford.
Worker Stealing, Using Worker, then Gifting it later to get Influence.

Furthermore, I find that in any competitive game there is a line that you must cross if you wish to compete at the highest levels of play. It is the Ethical Singularity where the game ends and the Mind Games begin. I have seen it in games from Poker, to Magic the Gathering, in professional Sports, and on into E-Sports such as League of Legends and Starcraft. I have crossed that Ethical Singularity in the past to win money and game prestige but it loses me more friends than it wins me prizes. Don't you guys think there needs to be a line short of Mind Games to keep a game fun even at the highest level of competitive play? Should people like myself who are college educated in Psychology and Sociology use our knowledge to manipulate our opponents? Doesn't doing that kind of thing seem unsportsmanlike, if not disrespectful to anyone else?

 

[shaglio]

UNETHICAL
Selling Luxuries to an AI to drain their Gold, DoW'ing to get your Luxuries back.
Beaker Overflow (any Math Exploit because some people cannot understand what you did).
Building Oxford, Selling the City, and Rebuilding Oxford.
Worker Stealing, Using Worker, then Gifting it later to get Influence.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the term, isn't Beaker Overflow an intended part of the game? It's a passive action for everyone, not something the player can do to get an advantage.

 

[DarkestOnion]

Unless I'm misunderstanding the term, isn't Beaker Overflow an intended part of the game? It's a passive action for everyone, not something the player can do to get an advantage.

An explanation lies in this thread
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=517970

Suffice it to say that just because you can do something in a game, that does not necessarily mean it is automatically ethical/fair to use an Exploit imho.

 

[lindsay40k]

Building Oxford, Selling the City, and Rebuilding Oxford.

Holy crap. Skyscrapers, Resettlement and Five Year Plan just became terrifying. Especially with Commerce for the money and super happiness.

Of course, every building gets sold and the population starved to nothing before the city is sold to some dumb AI that loves one tile islands

 

[lindsay40k]

Beaker Overflow's one thing, Inflation is quite another. I had a go with it so as to be able to recognise it when someone does it in MP, and crikey, it's a dark and unpredictable bit of witchcraft. Seems pretty likely to burn out or overheat and kill a bottleneck tech. I guess my advice for countering it is make damn sure they can't spy-steal the tech they kill

 

[TLHeart]

and the inflation of the beaker overflow ONLY happens when other civilizations have researched the tech...if you are the first to research a tech, there is ZERO inflation...

 

[Question]

Selling luxuries to AIs then declaring war to get it back became a lot less powerful in BNW now that you need a DOF to trade gold, otherwise you can only trade GPT.