SGOTM 15 - Kakumeika

[bcool]

Summary of our game is complete. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=11192541&postcount=4

So for all those who don't want to read all 4000 posts you should thank mabraham (I summarized my last turn there and I think the character count is at 29999 )

Congratulation for a very well planned and played game. Your strategy fits this map the best, nice to see another competitive team rising.

Thanks!

 

[shulec]

Great turnset for the last 10 turns bcool. If we had time, I bet we could have beaten that to death and taken about a month to play it! It looks like it was a sticky situation right until the end!

 

[bcool]

Great turnset for the last 10 turns bcool. If we had time, I bet we could have beaten that to death and taken about a month to play it! It looks like it was a sticky situation right until the end!

It was very sticky. I didn't mention that Toku had gone in WHEOOHRN and probably was targeting us.

Also maximizing food in all our cities.

Plus before I made a ceasefire with Shaka I swear Shaka wasn't the worst enemy of Hammuragawa. However when I checked after the ceasefire he was. There was no option so I gave Shaka back his hindu city but did not get any relations hit with Hammuragawa. We could have weathered a -4 hit but I was still surprised that it didn't show up.

Also we didn't get diplo hits from 2 spies that got caught trying to flip hammuragawa over to Hinduism.

I also poisoned the Southern Team AI's capital and made it unhappy with our 2 spies there... might have reduced its pop by 2. (but I think he might have just whipped it)

I was poised to poison FishTown too, but liz had trade routes to it so it had plenty of health and happiness. She did whip it for us though.

I'm pretty sure if we had not won T186, we would have had to go for a different victory condition (or conquered an AI completely and converted their cities to hindu).

 

[LowtherCastle]

Congratulations on weathering the Toku storm and achieving an excellent result!

I have one concern, to be frank. Yes, the AP voting with the team is a bug. Don't you consider using that bug, in this case, an exploit? I believe the usually distinction between a mere bug and an exploit is that there is some trade-off for using the bug. In this case, I don't see that you lose anything by abusing the bug. In that respect it's comparable to the bug allowing you to gain multiple techs from the Oracle. (By contrast, gifting and re-gifting AIs back to them to gain 1.5 plusmods each time requires the trade-off of turns and unit-turns and the potential gains from owning the cities. Or gifting the caravels+missionaries, for example, requires a trade-off.)

I don't see how this bug can be interpreted as anything other than an exploit and should be banned in SGs if not in the entire CFC community.

 

[bcool]

Congratulations on weathering the Toku storm and achieving an excellent result!

I have one concern, to be frank. Yes, the AP voting with the team is a bug. Don't you consider using that bug, in this case, an exploit? I believe the usually distinction between a mere bug and an exploit is that there is some trade-off for using the bug. In this case, I don't see that you lose anything by abusing the bug. In that respect it's comparable to the bug allowing you to gain multiple techs from the Oracle. (By contrast, gifting and re-gifting AIs back to them to gain 1.5 plusmods each time requires the trade-off of turns and unit-turns and the potential gains from owning the cities. Or gifting the caravels+missionaries, for example, requires a trade-off.)

I don't see how this bug can be interpreted as anything other than an exploit and should be banned in SGs if not in the entire CFC community.

we never used the OB with all Hindu members option with the ap voting. So to my knowledge we never used the bug with the ap voting. I don't know if other options existed because of the bug or not.

This was something that should have been discussed in the maintenance thread but it was too late I suppose.

 

[Bebekija]

Congratulations on your great game Kakus, you really deserved the gold on this one!
Your thread was a great read as well. Even though it was sometimes hard to read 10 full pages at once , I learned a LOT. So thanks to you!

I don't see how this bug can be interpreted as anything other than an exploit and should be banned in SGs if not in the entire CFC community.

Well it's the flying camera debate all over again, isn't it?
Personally, I'd say that as long as a technique/bug/exploit has not been explicitly banned, then there's no reason not to use it. And if you're the first one to discover it, then good for you!
EDIT after Xpost with bcool : And if you discover it and *don't* use it , then even better

However, now that we are all aware of it, I agree that we should not use it in future games, it feels kinda lame.
Would it be possible to correct it in BUFFY 3.20 or something? Or is it "hard-coded"?

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Congratulation for a very well planned and played game. Your strategy fits this map the best, nice to see another competitive team rising.

Thanks for your kind comments.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[Manco Capac]

gifting and re-gifting AIs back to them to gain 1.5 plusmods each time requires the trade-off of turns and unit-turns and the potential gains from owning the cities.

Already, some people dislikes city liberating new system for an alternative of diplo modifiers gaining, but I don't see how infinite city liberating to a civ with which we are at war is gonna be more accepted and has some trade-off. +1.5 waiting another turn or a cheap unit (given you disband it (e.g. chariots at 2 tiles diagonally to avoid occupying the captured city's BFC for the most efficient repetitive liberation) is quite a huge boost. Almost forgiving all the bad diplo actions of the past. Indeed, a possible trade-off is seeing a SoD approaching and cut short of the process, but other than that...I don't know.

 

[bcool]

Congratulations on your great game Kakus, you really deserved the gold on this one!
Your thread was a great read as well. Even though it was sometimes hard to read 10 full pages at once , I learned a LOT. So thanks to you!



Well it's the flying camera debate all over again, isn't it?
Personally, I'd say that as long as a technique/bug/exploit has not been explicitly banned, then there's no reason not to use it. And if you're the first one to discover it, then good for you!
EDIT after Xpost with bcool : And if you discover it and *don't* use it , then even better

However, now that we are all aware of it, I agree that we should not use it in future games, it feels kinda lame.
Would it be possible to correct it in BUFFY 3.20 or something? Or is it "hard-coded"?

Glad you enjoyed and learned from the thread. At times I was overwhelmed by it too.

To be honest I'm pretty sure we would have used the bug to get OB with all Hindus if it had ever made sense to use it.
A Holy War is superior to the OB vote anyways. Since once you share a war you get OB too. The holy war to my knowledge came up as it should have.

 

[Gumbolt]

I questioned how the Ap war vote and OB vote came up in our game.

It seemed we had to have:
Been at war with an Ai without our religion in any of it's cities.
To have one other AI with our religion in a city of theirs at war with the same AI when the vote arrived.

In my test games this was the only way to make the war vote work.

In both attempts with Hammy and Persia this seemed to work.

For OB it seemed to work the same but needing 2 Ai with our religion in one of their cities. Although other claim this would of worked anyway with just one AI.

Not clear how the team Ai affected these votes. It would be hard to ban a bug if some teams didn't know they had even used it. Hmmmm.

Some clarification would be great!

 

[Xcalibrator]

One wonders if the UN suffers from similar bugs when there are teamed AI.

 

[LowtherCastle]

we never used the OB with all Hindu members option with the ap voting. So to my knowledge we never used the bug with the ap voting. I don't know if other options existed because of the bug or not.

By voting, I meant voting on any sort of AP resolution. Specifically, I'm talking about this:

The Hindu AP was significantly more useful than it would have been expected to have been, because of the bug with team AI. There will have been multiple full members of the Buddhist AP, such that maybe you didn't observe this in your game. However, the code that checks whether a suitable Full Member exists for various AP resolutions is buggy when a team is present - erroneously reporting that a Full Member exists in some cases. This allowed us to call for Holy War on Shaka and then on Liz when we were at war with them, despite us being the only real Full Member at the time, when Holy War is supposed to require that a Full Member exists who is not at war with the target. This was critical to Kakumeika's game, because it allowed us to get OB and +diplo from shared war earlier than we could otherwise have managed.

In other words, you guys knew full well that you weren't supposed to be able call for a Holy War, yet you did it anyway, at no cost. That's an exploit as far as I can tell (not having tested it out myself). COntrast it with what the Plasitc Ducks did. They got plusmods from AP resolutions by voting for the AI they wanted plusmods with, but they had to expose themselves to any unpleasant ramifications of that resolution. Fair trade. You guys incurred no such ramifications--you were already at war. That's my point.

Well it's the flying camera debate all over again, isn't it?
Personally, I'd say that as long as a technique/bug/exploit has not been explicitly banned, then there's no reason not to use it. And if you're the first one to discover it, then good for you!

That's not been the tradition at CFC. Bugs are immediately reported and debated as to whether they're an exploit and as to whether there's any way to avoid allowing them in the game, and so forth. In SG9 (iirc) Erkon discovered a major exploit that would have enabled MW to locate every AI city on the map. He immediately reported it and Murky Waters did NOT use it, even though we couldn't stop anyone else form using it and it has since been disabled by BUFFY.

Already, some people dislikes city liberating new system for an alternative of diplo modifiers gaining, but I don't see how infinite city liberating to a civ with which we are at war is gonna be more accepted and has some trade-off. +1.5 waiting another turn or a cheap unit (given you disband it (e.g. chariots at 2 tiles diagonally to avoid occupying the captured city's BFC for the most efficient repetitive liberation) is quite a huge boost. Almost forgiving all the bad diplo actions of the past. Indeed, a possible trade-off is seeing a SoD approaching and cut short of the process, but other than that...I don't know.

First of all, the +1.5 is intentionally coded into the game. Second, you only get the 1.5 if the recipient has dominant culture there, which means your unit gets booted several tiles away if the city is old enough. Third, you have to whip the city down to pop1 or pop2 or else that AI can immediately start whipping units to protect it. Fourth, you get -3 each time you DoW him and -1 or -2 with his friends. And on and on....

But don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing in favor of it. We could vote to ban it as an exploit too as far as I'm concerned. I'm just saying it DOES involve trade-offs. A lot of trade-offs in fact. (Btw, OSS didn't use that anyway...)

 

[Manco Capac]

First of all, the +1.5 is intentionally coded into the game. Second, you only get the 1.5 if the recipient has dominant culture there, which means your unit gets booted several tiles away if the city is old enough. Third, you have to whip the city down to pop1 or pop2 or else that AI can immediately start whipping units to protect it. Fourth, you get -3 each time you DoW him and -1 or -2 with his friends. And on and on....

But don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing in favor of it. We could vote to ban it as an exploit too as far as I'm concerned. I'm just saying it DOES involve trade-offs. A lot of trade-offs in fact. (Btw, OSS didn't use that anyway...)

No, I was referring to the weirdest stuff DanF brought us in middle game; I think I mistakened what you meant. I'm pretty sure few have seen this particular post of his in the huge pool of posts.

In fact, the weird exploit of infinite city liberation while being at war with a civ was cut short in discussion fast for being overly abusive.

He succeeded to make it possible to liberate repetitively with one we are at war, but we don't really know how he did it. Hope he'll come back to see his contributions helped the team up to the silver medal. But the beast life cycle has ended...looks like to be...

Okay, found the post.
==========> http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=11412985&postcount=1948

I think we shall ban this.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Well, there's precedent in both directions.

Think of the old whipping bug in v1.61 - there wasn't anything you could do about it, and both the AIs and players who didn't know the details benefited from it, so it couldn't be banned. It wasn't even very easy to avoid using it, knowing the mechanic in detail, since sometimes you'd need to whip a unit just at a certain time.

On the other hand, when there's something completely game-breaking which you have to go out of your way to take advantage of, that's very easy to not use and clearly the result of a bug, it's just not very fun to be the only ones using it - the games stop being comparable to each other. Either no one use it or everyone should at least have the knowledge that there's something out there.

I think the resolution criteria bug falls into the first category - other teams might have used this without even knowing, and selecting "none" (if it's even an option) when the only other option is a broken resolution makes you wait 10 turns for the next vote, instead of collapsing the vote cycles for the next AP Resident election.

I think you meant for this post to be in the Kaku's thread, so I'm moving it...

I'm not sure what you mean by the collapsing votes part of your analysis. If a broken resolution is passed, then the 10t is normal, right? If there's a none possiblity (is there?) then what happens?

In any case, my original intention was to carefully phrase this as a concern, not an indictment against what the Kakus did. I don't even know how they used it, because I haven't studied the thread. Also, as I said above, I haven't tested it myself, so I don't know the intricacies of the bug. It just strikes me as an EXPLOIT, as traditionally defined.

 

[bcool]

Quote:
Originally Posted by bcool
we never used the OB with all Hindu members option with the ap voting. So to my knowledge we never used the bug with the ap voting. I don't know if other options existed because of the bug or not.
By voting, I meant voting on any sort of AP resolution. Specifically, I'm talking about this:
Quote:
Originally Posted by mabraham
The Hindu AP was significantly more useful than it would have been expected to have been, because of the bug with team AI. There will have been multiple full members of the Buddhist AP, such that maybe you didn't observe this in your game. However, the code that checks whether a suitable Full Member exists for various AP resolutions is buggy when a team is present - erroneously reporting that a Full Member exists in some cases. This allowed us to call for Holy War on Shaka and then on Liz when we were at war with them, despite us being the only real Full Member at the time, when Holy War is supposed to require that a Full Member exists who is not at war with the target. This was critical to Kakumeika's game, because it allowed us to get OB and +diplo from shared war earlier than we could otherwise have managed.
In other words, you guys knew full well that you weren't supposed to be able call for a Holy War, yet you did it anyway, at no cost. That's an exploit as far as I can tell (not having tested it out myself). COntrast it with what the Plasitc Ducks did. They got plusmods from AP resolutions by voting for the AI they wanted plusmods with, but they had to expose themselves to any unpleasant ramifications of that resolution. Fair trade. You guys incurred no such ramifications--you were already at war. That's my point.

Well I for one never realized that this was the case with the Holy War vote during the game.

This is from the AP guide in the war academy.

1. Declare war on X
Prerequisite: One Full Member (but not all Full Members) must be at war with X, and X must be a Non-Member.
If passed, all Members are instantly at war with X.

A close reading does suggest that the holy war only was allowed because of the fictious full Hindu members.

Obviously we need to test this because the guide isn't always accurate. I honestly was unaware for the entire game that the holy war shouldn't have come up.

It is a little hard to ban these votes in the middle of the game. Some teams may have used them as we did without knowing they were bugs.
Also who knows we might have been able to adapt our game to make a full member of the AP religion and still get wars.

Temporarily flip someone to be a full hindu member then get the AP vote for Holy War, then capture their hindu city to get them to flip out again. It wouldn't have been that hard to do.

I personally have no issues with this because I committed the error in ignorance. I think the whole team did (but of course I could be wrong).

Honestly this is something that really should have been caught by the mapmaker. But once the game begins and people encounter the issue I can't see a fair way to resolve the issue.

 

[LowtherCastle]

@Tachy

I followed DanF's instructions and got this:



I wonder if it was an artifact of debug mode or something like that...

 

[bcool]

I think you meant for this post to be in the Kaku's thread, so I'm moving it...

I'm not sure what you mean by the collapsing votes part of your analysis. If a broken resolution is passed, then the 10t is normal, right? If there's a none possiblity (is there?) then what happens?

In any case, my original intention was to carefully phrase this as a concern, not an indictment against what the Kakus did. I don't even know how they used it, because I haven't studied the thread. Also, as I said above, I haven't tested it myself, so I don't know the intricacies of the bug. It just strikes me as an EXPLOIT, as traditionally defined.

If no resolutions are possible, then the next opportunity for a vote happens the next turn rather than 10 turns later. So making a resolution possible when it shouldn't have been changes how the AP voting works significantly.

 

[LowtherCastle]

@bcool: You're right, I stand corrected. Only you had to be a full member for the DoW to be available. That's neat! oSS didn't even begin to consider such advantages of building the AP. Shame on us...

 

[Manco Capac]

I wonder if it was an artifact of debug mode or something like that...

Then I have no idea what he did. I'll talk to him once he returns if ever he doesn't reach this part of the thread.

Could be the debug, or many things.


Good thing there's no ultimate diplo bug.

EDIT: Wait, your units are threatening Toku's city. As far as I remember, a threatening unit in city BFC makes the AI refuses the city liberation, thus disabling the option. Try to disband your units, then report if any change. I'm making my own test meanwhile...

 

[Gumbolt]

So for the Ap war vote and OB vote to work an Ai had to have adopted the Hindu religion. Not just have it in one of their cities. Which might make sense as we had gifted a city to the incas on our game.

Still hard to ban this exploit. The simple answer to the debate is to remove teams from SGOTM. Although teams can make some interesting scenarios.