cracker
Gil Favor's Sidekick
As promised, I indicated that we would open a discussion thread on this topic after Gotm16-Rome was closed.
This is not in any way intended to be a spoiler thread so any discussion of Gotm17-Carthage beyond the information that I provide here will have to be deleted.
On February 21st, while we were in the midst of game testing for Gotm17, I recieved a quick heads-up notice from Charis that a new exploit had been discovered by T-hawk at Realms-Beyond.
Within about 2 hours of the exploit announcement, we were able to confirm the thexploit truly did exist in every version of the Civ3 and PTW software and provide notification of the problem directly to Firaxis through our GOTM liaison contact.
What the exploit does is basically allow any player that has discovered nationalism to just clisk on the War Mobilization button and then use a ratcheting process to progressively jack up the shield production output in any or every city to any desired level. Once the ratcheting is completed the inflated shield output can be maintained indefinately until the population of the city changes.
Effectively, wth the exploit in place, it is possible to take cities that only produce 2 or 3 shields per turn and ratchet them up to produce enough shields so that they can produce a full unit, wonder, or improvement of any type in every turn. An empire of 30 cities could be producing 30 nukes per turn or 30 modern armore per turn or 30 cruise missiles per turn indefinately.
We evaluated the options available to us and recognized that it would be impossible to expect a patch software fix to this exploit bug at least in the short term. This bug exist in all three (now all four) versions of the software. The priority option seemed to be to avoid disussing the exploit in public and to try and gently suppress discussion until Gotm16-Rome was closed and at the same time to rework all the version of Gotm17-Carthage to disable the exploit if possible. Since all the Gotm17 game files had been completed and were in testing this required us to regenerate all three of the base map versions.
Looking at the game setup functions we could access the nationalism technology advance and just disable the war mobilization function. This still leaves MPPs and draft enabled as special features of Nationalism. The effect will probably reduce the value that the AI leaders place on trading nationalism, but should not result in a change in AI behavior or stratgies.
Disabling War mobilization may impact some players who are about to get themselves killed but in general the higher level players do not seem to use the Mobilization effect for legitimate purposes based on past game examples.
We will probably keep war mobilization disabled until a more permanent solution can be proposed that will be effective in both Civ3 and PTW.
If you would like to see the original description of the exploit here is the link:
http://www.network54.com/Hide/Forum/message?forumid=189557&messageid=1045858346
We would welcome any suggestions or discussion of ways that the impact of this exploit could be avoided.
REMEMBER to avoid any discussion of Gotm17-Carthage, bbut if you have any questions or inputs on the Carthage game you may privately email them to me at gotm@civfanatics.net
This is not in any way intended to be a spoiler thread so any discussion of Gotm17-Carthage beyond the information that I provide here will have to be deleted.
On February 21st, while we were in the midst of game testing for Gotm17, I recieved a quick heads-up notice from Charis that a new exploit had been discovered by T-hawk at Realms-Beyond.
Within about 2 hours of the exploit announcement, we were able to confirm the thexploit truly did exist in every version of the Civ3 and PTW software and provide notification of the problem directly to Firaxis through our GOTM liaison contact.
What the exploit does is basically allow any player that has discovered nationalism to just clisk on the War Mobilization button and then use a ratcheting process to progressively jack up the shield production output in any or every city to any desired level. Once the ratcheting is completed the inflated shield output can be maintained indefinately until the population of the city changes.
Effectively, wth the exploit in place, it is possible to take cities that only produce 2 or 3 shields per turn and ratchet them up to produce enough shields so that they can produce a full unit, wonder, or improvement of any type in every turn. An empire of 30 cities could be producing 30 nukes per turn or 30 modern armore per turn or 30 cruise missiles per turn indefinately.
We evaluated the options available to us and recognized that it would be impossible to expect a patch software fix to this exploit bug at least in the short term. This bug exist in all three (now all four) versions of the software. The priority option seemed to be to avoid disussing the exploit in public and to try and gently suppress discussion until Gotm16-Rome was closed and at the same time to rework all the version of Gotm17-Carthage to disable the exploit if possible. Since all the Gotm17 game files had been completed and were in testing this required us to regenerate all three of the base map versions.
Looking at the game setup functions we could access the nationalism technology advance and just disable the war mobilization function. This still leaves MPPs and draft enabled as special features of Nationalism. The effect will probably reduce the value that the AI leaders place on trading nationalism, but should not result in a change in AI behavior or stratgies.
Disabling War mobilization may impact some players who are about to get themselves killed but in general the higher level players do not seem to use the Mobilization effect for legitimate purposes based on past game examples.
We will probably keep war mobilization disabled until a more permanent solution can be proposed that will be effective in both Civ3 and PTW.
If you would like to see the original description of the exploit here is the link:
http://www.network54.com/Hide/Forum/message?forumid=189557&messageid=1045858346
We would welcome any suggestions or discussion of ways that the impact of this exploit could be avoided.
REMEMBER to avoid any discussion of Gotm17-Carthage, bbut if you have any questions or inputs on the Carthage game you may privately email them to me at gotm@civfanatics.net
