Sacrificing your population. Strategy or exploit

[Studlybob23]

I'm in a game with some friends. I'm in third place in a game. The guy in second place is barely ahead of me and the guy in first is HUGE.

I decided to try and get the 2nd place guy to join with me to take out the guy who was dominating. He refused because he was scared to get into a war. I threatened the guy in second place and eventually attacked him. If he wasn't going to help me then I needed to take his cities and use them to help me wage war. That was my justification.

During the fight it's obvious to him that I have a way bigger army then he does and he's going to lose.

In retaliation, he switches his civic to Slavery (probably a strategy he picked up from this forum) and started using slavery in all his cities every turn. Turning his cities into crap so that I don’t' get as much when I take them, thus basically ensuring that the guy on top wins.

My question is whether or not you guys think that is an exploit of a game mechanic. Of course the way I see it is that the "destroy population" slavery option is a negative effect to a very good result. He's just using the negative effect to his advantage to mess me up, even though it doesn't save him. He isn't even attacking me with the units he creates via slavery. He's sending them to one of the other continents where he has some cities. It's clear his main purpose is to ruin the cities I'm taking.

Do you guys think this is an exploit of a feature in the game? I.e Something the game developers did not mean to be used in this fashion? Or is he just using clever strategy?

I am really not here to whine about it because it's a friendly game. I just wanted to know if my feeling of "that is kind of shady" is justified or not.

 

[IglooDame]

What was he whipping? Whipping defender units is a time-honored tradition and possibly the best thing he could do. If he's just whipping unnecessary buildings, or sacrificial settlers or something, then it's kind of a mean thing to do, but I still wouldn't call it an exploit. If he was really intent on screwing you, he could just gift cities to that first-place player.

 

[Bernout1]

I don't think it's shady...you declared war on him after all. I'd expect any good player to start whipping out defending units as quickly as they could. Giving you a smaller city or no city at all is in his best interest especially if he knows he can't get it back or that you might raze it anyhow.

Bernout

 

[OverloadUT]

I'm the jerk he declared war on whipping my cities in to oblivion. I too am curious what people think of this strategy though.

In one city, he was going to take it on his next move, so I selected a unit that had enough production so I could whip the maximum number of population (taking it from 15 to 7) but then I switched to a different unit so that I could whip again on the same turn, taking it from 7 to 4, and then one final switch to take it from 4 to 2. Obviously this move was only to reduce the population as I didn't even get the production benefit from those whips. Exploitative? It's possible.... If a game admin said that whipping more than once on the same turn is not allowed, I would not object to it being a house rule.

On some further back cities I started whipping, but I actually did get the units produced from those whips and I airlifted them to the new world to help defend my cities over there, where the situation is much less dire.

The big draw-back from this strategy is that I had to switch off of Emancipation for 7(?) painful turns, and since every other civ in the world has Emancipation, my cities on the new world suffered from unhappiness something fierce.

Now, the "strategy" of gifting my cities to another player before my enemy could take them... that I think would be abusing the system. If a player has out-strategized you and is going to take your cities, he should be able to get them - you might be able to cripple the cities as I have done, and you might be able to get someone else to declare war on him, or even pillage your own land, but the game specifically does not allow you to raze your own cities for this very reason. I feel that gifting cities away to prevent them from getting taken is using a loophole to get around the "can't raze your own cities" rule.

But of course, this is just my opinion.

 

[the oob]

Now, the "strategy" of gifting my cities to another player before my enemy could take them... that I think would be abusing the system. If a player has out-strategized you and is going to take your cities, he should be able to get them - you might be able to cripple the cities as I have done, and you might be able to get someone else to declare war on him, or even pillage your own land, but the game specifically does not allow you to raze your own cities for this very reason. I feel that gifting cities away to prevent them from getting taken is using a loophole to get around the "can't raze your own cities" rule.

Yeah I actually have a rule against this for my games. But scorched earth whipping is all good.

 

[CB Droege]

Whenever I try to decide if a strategy is 'fair' or not is to thinmk to myself "Is this something that could have ever been done historically as a strategy against a foe? Is it possible to do this think in the real world?"

Using that standard the only thing I can think of in CivIV that isn't rally 'fair' is taking advantage of a 'double turn'.

I actually don't even agree with the decision to not allow a player to raize their own cities, but mostly that's because sometimes a city ends up in the wrong place, and you want to pick it up and move it. There is no mechanism for that anymore.

 

[Studlybob23]

I actually see your point. Destroying your own land to hurt the person taking it over is historically accurate. Notably in the Civil War the south would burn all it's fields so that the North couldn't use them to supply their troops. There are cases like this all through history.

So in that light I guess it's a fair thing to do.

 

[majk-iii]

It's just the good ol' (russian) scorched earth-tactics... a fine strategy.
I don't see any way it could be called an exploit... at all.
In fact, i reccon you should be allowed to raze your own cities if you felt the need to.

Anyway; Whipping units and sending them to other (planned/new) core-cities, while abandoning the cities they're whipped in, is not something you'd want to do, but something that tou may feel forced to if attacked by a stronger player... how could that be an exploit? It's merely survival-tactics.

 

[JMaltman]

It's just the good ol' (russian) scorched earth-tactics... a fine strategy.
I don't see any way it could be called an exploit... at all.
In fact, i reccon you should be allowed to raze your own cities if you felt the need to.

Anyway; Whipping units and sending them to other (planned/new) core-cities, while abandoning the cities they're whipped in, is not something you'd want to do, but something that tou may feel forced to if attacked by a stronger player... how could that be an exploit? It's merely survival-tactics.

Scorched earth is fine IMO.

But if you WERE able to raze your own cities, then I think there should be some big civ-wide happiness penalties, and for it to require a certain number of troops - maybe 1 per pop point. Your own people do not appreciate being slaughtered/having their houses burned down and sent to the countryside.

 

[CB Droege]

Well, back when Setters causes population to decrease, you could continue to build settlers and send them to join another town until the source town disapeared altogether. I liked that system better.

 

[JMaltman]

Well, back when Setters causes population to decrease, you could continue to build settlers and send them to join another town until the source town disapeared altogether. I liked that system better.

Forced emigration.

Again, should make people unhappy... but there is a historical precedent. Unfortunately it was often selective... which is again, a place the designers likely don't want to go.

 

[Bjorn190]

Well, I think slavery should be hard coded with a patch to be 1 whipping per turn only. But while this strategy exists, it might be a good way to stop an attacker from attacking lol.

Its actually kinda funny-

 

[ZB2]

scorch earth - destroy (or sell, like you could in Civ3) the buildings inside the city.