war mobilization bug

[nihil8r]

i am playing a fantastic game right now, it is the best civ game of my life in fact. however, i just ran into an enormous bug, and i'm pretty much going to state outright that i'm going to continue to play with it, because there are plenty of HOF scores that were achieved with wonky version numbers. this is a 1.27f PTW game, and i just learned nationalism and went into war mobilization. however, ALL cities are benefiting from increased production. the towns building banks, the palace, and even magellan's voyage had their time-to-completion cut in half. MV went from 20 turns to 11 turns.

i quit the game out and restarted it and it was still doing it. normally we don't allow replays, but i made an exception and tried waiting before starting the mobilization to see if that prevented the bug from happening. it still happened.

i have never seen or noticed this before. i am just going to play with the bug. we will just assume that the computer is benefitting from the l33t hax as well.

of course if anyone would like to see this for themself or try to replicate it here it is RIGHT BEFORE i turned on war mobilization. all you have to do is turn it on.

http://www.nihil8r.com/civ3/nih_bug.zip

 

[nihil8r]

hey i just loaded up a totally different game. i went into war mobilization, and all of the towns were +1 shield. even the ones making cathedrals, etc.

has it just always been like this? am i really that stupid that i just didn't notice that it doesn't work like it says in the civpedia?

 

[superslug]

EDIT: Original content deleted due to lack of functioning brain cells...

 

[nihil8r]

Originally posted by superslug

You better clear this with Aeson, he's the only one who decides whether or not replays are acceptable. The only two allowable precedents I've seen allowed are software crashes and premature domination, which is avoidable through use of MapStat.

well it was "in the past" in the game. i had played several turns ahead with several saves. i believe it was 4 turns ahead when i came here with the first post and the save game that i went back to and then reloaded it to skip a turn. i would be happy to provide the save games (with unalterable windows xp pro timestamps ) if anyone is reallly that paranoid about it.

it doesn't have any bearing on what i do 50 years in the future in a totally different save ... it'd be like going back to the 4000 bc save and disbanding my settler just to see what happens. can you even disband your first settler?

 

[superslug]

My bad! I seriously misunderstood you! I should've realized you were just taking a peek to see what happened. Disregard previous post, and I'm glad you're game is going well...

 

[nihil8r]

lol i'm sure i'll screw it up somehow. thanks for your quick response, and how can you be the dumb one when it took me 1 year to figure out that they released 2 games with war mobilization implemented incorrectly????

status right now is year - 1480 ad
domination limit - 3726
aquired tiles - 1076
tiles to limit - 2650
score - 1805
persia's score - 56 - good job xerxes
culture - 24408, but France's is higher
scientific method discovered in 7 turns
pre-building Universal Suffrage in 12 turns, will instantaneously build Theory of Evolution
have built Pyramids, Great Library, Great Wall, Sun Tzu, Leo's Workshop, Sistine Chapel, Magellan's Voyage, Copernicus' Observatory, Bach's Cathedral, Newton's University, Smith's Trading Company (built with leader)
have built Pentagon, Military Academy, have hand-built 2 new palaces
have captured an Iron Works capable town from the English
have spawned 5 great leaders to date
have 1 3xMInf veteran army and 4 mixed veteran/elite 4xCavalry armies in play

i am totally looking forward to 500 years of communism and almost constant war mobilization. how many towns will i need to build to support 1000 panzers?

thanks again for your help with pointing out the "bug" superslug!

 

[superslug]

Are you going to be at war for all 500 of those years? Sounds like fun!
EDIT: Great pics!

 

[Aeson]

Interesting, thanks for bringing it up. I'm absolutely sure it didn't always work like this, but have no idea which patch may have introduced the problem. Probably a result of fixing the Mobilization exploit.

 

[superslug]

Now I'm confused as to what the phrase Mobilization exploit actually refers to. I know there was a problem with Mobilization (not sure what) and the "answer" was to add the shield bonus to all cities for all construction (not just military).

I can't really tell you more than that, I'm afraid. Since my precious and often used Sipahi, Riders and Cavalry all come before then, I can't recall the last time I used Mobilization.

 

[nihil8r]

i don't know what the mobilization exploit was either and i had no interest in ever finding out. back when i played my only gotm last march is when i heard about it. it was why they manually removed mobilization from the gotm. if i remember correclty cracker said that what the exploit did was somehow allow you to make infinite shields per city.

just using nationalism to boost production before you declare a war isn't the exploit. that's just strategy. however because the increase in production affects all towns you can start long term projects and then go into mobilization to speed them up and just wait a while to declare a war. however, you will have to declare a war pretty soon.

you could try to exploit this by starting civilian projects, going into mobilization, waiting until they are done, then attacking someone. the problem is you have to wait until they are willing to talk to you to try to get peace. and, your "furiousness rating" will depend on how soon they are willing to talk to you. if you try to do it to the same civ twice in a row they will take forever to talk to you, keeping you in war.

and if you try to do it to different civs over and over, well, they are going to be making protection pacts and alliances. and they are going to be "furious" so they will simply never want to talk to you. so figure you could do it once to each civ, but you'd be stuck in mobilization for at least 10-20 turns while waiting for the enemy to agree to peace. even if they have 1/10th of your military and country size, especially if they are military characterstic and they are furious towards you, it will take a long time for them to agree to peace.

in my opinion as someone who takes advantage of mobilization to suppress culture and boost military & army production as much as possible, now that i know that it affects all towns, exploiting nationalism is both risky and stupid. i always have set all of my towns to build civilian projects before going into mobilization ... not even knowing that it was making my stuff build faster until yesterday. i just did that so i would have some stuff built before everything switched over to troops. i've been in mobilization for 20, 30 turns in a row before, so i know that its not a short term production boost.

when i use it, i usually plan that i will be in mobilization until i either kill the civilization i'm invading or until one of the weakling pansy democratic civs on the other side of the world caves in and begs to give me all of their money to get out of the war they idiotically started for whtaever reason 100 years ago. then i simply set all towns to civilian projects and go right back into mobilization. it's no exploit ... it's just good strategy.

 

[Aeson]

The mobilization exploit was generating infinite shields per turn. Definitely not this.

 

[superslug]

Thanks! I'm more clear now...