What should we consider as exploits?

leif erikson

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Please use this thread to discuss what game play we should consider as exploits. Please explain how the game play works and why we should consider it an exploit.

I have invited the Hall of Fame Staff to participate in this discussion so that we can be consistent between the two competitions.
 
I will use this post to list the exploits we find:
1. You are not allowed to gift cities to the AI when the VC is Religious Victory.
2. You are not allowed to sell a single unit of strategic resources or diplomatic favor for 1 gold per turn. (It will also cause the game to crash.) :eek:
 
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Goddess of the Harvest is definitely broken and can be exploited with huge gain. Until the pantheon bug is fixed, it should be considered an exploit and selecting this pantheon should be banned.

One thing that can be exploited, but it would be hard to define a rule regarding it, is selling cities. In the late game you can buy a settler for whatever this would cost (often <1000 gold), settle a city and sell it to the AI for 2000 gold, or whatever they want to pay. In a test I sold a pop 1 city the turn after it was settled for 2000 gold + a great work of writing, then I could immediately buy back said city for a fraction of the cost I just sold it. In addition I sold it to Russia, which expanded the cultural borders of the city with 8 tiles in the process. This is definitely an exploit, though I don't know how to define the rule. You could say you are not allowed to sell things to the AI and buy them back cheaper (this is how the earlier gpt exploits worked as well), but I assume a rule like that would be very hard to monitor.
 
Gifting (or selling) converted cities to an AI in order to obtain a religious victory. Not sure if that means no gifting/selling cities of your religion ever if you're going for a religious victory or if there's a narrower approach.
 
Gifting (or selling) converted cities to an AI in order to obtain a religious victory.
I would like to hear more justification for restricting this - it's certainly a staple of Civ IV HOF, not saying it's a bad idea to ban it but we need a really good case.
 
I would like to hear more justification for restricting this - it's certainly a staple of Civ IV HOF, not saying it's a bad idea to ban it but we need a really good case.

Buy doing this you can circumvent the normal timings where you either send units or missionaries over to go and achieve the victory. All you need to do is discover the AI exists from scouting and they could be on another continent and you can win by gifting without researching the tech to actually cross that continent. Gifting cities like this seems a very cheap exploit of an AI who doesn't understand victory conditions properly to me...
 
Buy doing this you can circumvent the normal timings where you either send units or missionaries over to go and achieve the victory. All you need to do is discover the AI exists from scouting and they could be on another continent and you can win by gifting without researching the tech to actually cross that continent. Gifting cities like this seems a very cheap exploit of an AI who doesn't understand victory conditions properly to me...

How is this an exploit? All players have the same advantage in using this strategy. What possible reason could one have for banning it?

I know that 6OTM (GOTM) bans it. In my opinion, they ban far too many things, most of which can't be verified. They do love galleon chaining in Civ IV and earlier; they would never ban that; seems a bit hypocritical in my opinion.

The AI not knowing better can't be used as an excuse. The AI makes horrible tactical and strategic mistakes. We should ban players from taking advantage of those mistakes! Well, maybe we should ban the Domination Victory. The AI is simply incompetent at waging war. We can't take advantage of that, can we? Of course we can, since we really have no choice until the developers improve the AI. No one wants to ban Domination Victory; We all know the Civ VI AI is horrible at waging war.

Let's just play the game as it is. We can ban the real exploits like infinite gold. We shouldn't ban everything someone really doesn't like. We need solid reasoning to justify banning certain techniques.
 
My initial reaction was also that it is standard play in Civ IV and why should it be any different in VI. There are some differences though.

In IV you also do it to circumvent the normal timings where you send missionaries over to go and achieve the victory. In addition you can circumvent things like not having open borders and not being able to spread religion to a Theocratic civ (no foreign religion spread), and by gifting the city you boost your diplomatic relations to help you win the vote. However, in IV there are also restrictions for gifting cities. The AI won't accept any city further than 9.5 tiles away if they already have 4 cities. If they have 4 cities they will never accept a city on another landmass. In VI there doesn't seem to be any restrictions, except that you cannot gift a captured AI capital. The victory mechanics are also different. In IV you need to win the vote, which usually means you need to keep enough cities for yourself. In VI you only need to make sure it is still your majority religion, so you can gift away all cities but your capital (and possibly some captured capitals) and win. On the other hand, in IV it is enough that every AI owns one city with your religion for the vote to become available, in VI you need a majority of their cities to follow your religion, so a lot of gifting would be needed on higher levels.

I haven't played any religious victory yet and can't comment on how impactful a strategy like this would be. Cannot say if I think it should be considered an exploit or not.
 
Gifting (or selling) converted cities to an AI in order to obtain a religious victory. Not sure if that means no gifting/selling cities of your religion ever if you're going for a religious victory or if there's a narrower approach.

This is the strategy I thought at first glance of gotm3. However, it is really up to situation. For example, you have 15 cities and 8 converted, the last AI have 3 cities, none converted. In this case, you would either convert 4 more your cities and sell them to the AI or send missionary(probably taking more turn) to convert AI's 2 more cities, or mix of these. First way requires you recruit 2 missionaries while second way you need 1 missionary. Which way is faster? It's up to map generation and faith per turn atm. I don't think it is really strong compared to conventional way in all case. As you said, it has advantages only if there's limitation like narrower approaches, however, it is up to player's decision to optimizing finishing turn, imho.
 
Gifting (or selling) converted cities to an AI in order to obtain a religious victory. Not sure if that means no gifting/selling cities of your religion ever if you're going for a religious victory or if there's a narrower approach.

Why wasn't this allowed in 6OTM 3? Can whoever made that decision chime in?

I'd be fine either way, I think (subject to more convincing augments). But if allowed, it should be on a list of explicitly allowed actions.
 
Goddess of the Harvest is definitely broken and can be exploited with huge gain. Until the pantheon bug is fixed, it should be considered an exploit and selecting this pantheon should be banned.
From what I've read it's not broken but poorly documented - the yield for chopping is multiplied by the number of cities you have.
 
From what I've read it's not broken but poorly documented - the yield for chopping is multiplied by the number of cities you have.
Exactly. And this is as broken as broken gets. A late game chop can yield 200 production. If you have 25 cities, that's 5000 faith/chop! With the help of this, you can go through late game great people way faster than is normally possible. Already in the very early game you can have enough cities to buy one apostle/chop. In the mid game, with Jesuit Education, a single chop can probably give you enough extra faith to buy a University or two...

This is clearly a bug. It is supposed to be faith equal to the other yield, as documented.
 
Exactly. And this is as broken as broken gets. A late game chop can yield 200 production. If you have 25 cities, that's 5000 faith/chop! With the help of this, you can go through late game great people way faster than is normally possible. Already in the very early game you can have enough cities to buy one apostle/chop. In the mid game, with Jesuit Education, a single chop can probably give you enough extra faith to buy a University or two...

This is clearly a bug. It is supposed to be faith equal to the other yield, as documented.

How did the Faith yield of Goddess of the Harvets get multiplied by the number of cities, if not done intentionally by the developers? I just don't see how it could have been an accidental bug. It's just one of these scaling issues that would not be noticed with empires of about 4 cities which was the norm for Civ V. It's probably not a bug so much as a discrepancy between the code and the in-game documentation.

This game has bigger issues than this discrepancy. The AI combat ability is absolutely atrocious. AI can easily capture cities, but it rarely captures player cities, even those without walls. As I have suggested elsewhere, perhaps Domination Victory should be banned.

There are other ways to generate huge amounts of Faith. Build Holy Cities and all religious buildings in 25 cities and you will have even greater Faith generation. Goddess of the Harvest is limited to the resources that can be harvested in one's borders; I don't like harvesting resources; I prefer improving them.

I'd prefer to play with the Goddess of the Harvest, before I'd judge it be a bannable exploit on the level of the infinite gold exploit that the Fall 2016 patch fixed. There is a huge difference between 5000 Faith per resource harvested (assuming 25 cities) and infinite gold. Note also that 5000 Faith per resource is acheiveable only at nearly the end of the game where one has huge amounts of other game outputs. Does it really have a game changing affect that is not in scale with everything else in this game that lacks balance (in the late game phase)?
 
How did the Faith yield of Goddess of the Harvets get multiplied by the number of cities, if not done intentionally by the developers? I just don't see how it could have been an accidental bug.
That was precisely my thought - hard to see how that happened accidentally.
 
I'd prefer to play with the Goddess of the Harvest, before I'd judge it be a bannable exploit on the level of the infinite gold exploit that the Fall 2016 patch fixed. There is a huge difference between 5000 Faith per resource harvested (assuming 25 cities) and infinite gold. Note also that 5000 Faith per resource is achievable only at nearly the end of the game where one has huge amounts of other game outputs. Does it really have a game changing affect that is not in scale with everything else in this game that lacks balance (in the late game phase)?

If you are getting thousands of faith per resource at the end-game then you can rush-buy all the great people extremely quickly. If its multiplied by cities then I'll just drop lots of 1 pop cities near resources, chop them all at the same time and get tens of thousands of faith in a few turns. It wouldn't even hurt my amenities much if I do this 5 turns before my spaceport is completed on a science victory.

I'm happy either way because executing that will be an interesting challenge, but it doesn't feel that the faith harvest should be so much.
 
It is indeed hard to tell how it could have been done accidentally, but it is possible. Pre-patch the pantheon gave you nothing. Then some dev rewrote the code so that the faith should be added to your closest city, the intention being that it is added in the same city as the resource yields, but accidentally made it so that it doesn't stop after finding the closest city and goes through all your cities to add that amount of faith.

If you want to keep it in, then sure, I'll use it. But don't expect t190 science victories to be competitive anymore.
 
That explanation does make sense to me, considering that developers often do things in round-about, inefficient ways. The Fall 2016 patch changed harvest or chopping so it could only be done inside cultural borders. Each tile should have a link to its owner city, so I don't understand why searching all cities would even be necessary to add the generated faith to the city that owns the target tile. Of course, I could be wrong about how tile ownership is recorded in the game.

Concerning building a lot of 1 pop cities: That would get very expensive, so your not getting something for nothing. It may be a good tactic or it may not. All the Great People I've seen (so far) in Civ VI are not worth pursuing, with the notable exception of the Great Prophet (The only way to found a Religion).

Again, I prefer to see for myself by actually playing the game whether Goddess of the Harvest contains an exploit worthy of a HoF ban.
 
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It is indeed hard to tell how it could have been done accidentally, but it is possible. Pre-patch the pantheon gave you nothing. Then some dev rewrote the code so that the faith should be added to your closest city, the intention being that it is added in the same city as the resource yields, but accidentally made it so that it doesn't stop after finding the closest city and goes through all your cities to add that amount of faith.
That's certainly a plausible explanation.
 
I don't see how to count it as an exploit, but really wish settlers would convert to builders upon capture. Need to be able to attack them so they don't settler where you don't want them to, but allowing me to get a free city out of it is just insane. Why the AI roams these without same space escort is beyond me. Last game I captured more settlers than I built.
 
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