What should we consider as exploits?

[Victoria]

Speaking of bypassing designed game flow to save on production costs, is the pre-placing of districts considered unsportsmanlike when it comes to GOTMs?

Not my rules but for me, no. For a start it is part of the game from the beginning and there has been no effort by the devs to resolve it. It has been discussed before, it also would be hard to police.
You can still play that way, nothing is stopping you.

 

[acluewithout]

Speaking of bypassing designed game flow to save on production costs, is the pre-placing of districts considered unsportsmanlike when it comes to GOTMs?

Not my rules but for me, no. For a start it is part of the game from the beginning and there has been no effort by the devs to resolve it. It has been discussed before, it also would be hard to police.
You can still play that way, nothing is stopping you.

I don't think pre-placing districts is an exploit. Or, if it is, it's completely acceptable. After all, you're still population capped for placed districts, if you place them earlier you're usually limited to the first ring (unless you spend precious early gold), and you do ultimately have to pay for the district via production (although, of course the point is it works out cheaper by pre-placing). Building via chops also has risks, because if you don't actually have any production in a city then you can't repair pillaged districts.

The flip side is that if you don't pre-place, then a lot of the silliness about escalating district costs really bite, so to me pre-placing makes the game much more enjoyable and satisfying than not.

(OMG. What am I doing on the GOTM forum? I don't belong here! *scuttles back to I&G and GD threads where he can go back to complaining about Governors and Anti-Cav*)

 

[Ownsya]

Will the "list" ever be populated or has that idea been scratched for some reason? (2nd post on this thread)
Was wondering because I recently came across some absolutely ridiculous exploits for GS and others that I myself wouldn't really consider exploits. Wondering what the rules are for gotm. An easy access list would be nice.

 

[leif erikson]

When the community agrees that something is an exploit, we can make a list?

The problem has always been that exploits can be moving targets. Each patch fixes some things and opens holes in others. Personally, I cannot keep track of what is an issue and what is not?

 

[Ownsya]

Yea I guess it's not an easy thing to handle with so many varying opinions and patch-fixes. Makes sense. I started reading this thread and maybe 4 pages in started thinking it might be nice if there was a list of exploits that are unanimously (or close) agreed upon to I could skip all the discussion but I guess it might be impractical. 2 pages into the "Goddess of the Harvest" discussion I finally reached the point that it's been patched

 

[Eyswein]

Only almost unanimous one is gifting cities for a religious victory.

 

[leif erikson]

Good point, I'll add it.

 

[A_Modern_Major_General]

I was just playing through the Canada gotm as I felt I was messing things up badly with Turkey, and realized that the AI will trade 1gpt for any strategic resource or diplomatic favor if they do not have any gold in their treasury. Needless to say I tried another practice run with that in mind and all 6 AI I've met have given me all of their gold by turn 50. I would say getting 60gpt out of each strategic resource by trading it that way would qualify as an exploit.

 

[kcd_swede]

I was just playing through the Canada gotm as I felt I was messing things up badly with Turkey, and realized that the AI will trade 1gpt for any strategic resource or diplomatic favor if they do not have any gold in their treasury. Needless to say I tried another practice run with that in mind and all 6 AI I've met have given me all of their gold by turn 50. I would say getting 60gpt out of each strategic resource by trading it that way would qualify as an exploit.

Well, you are giving up something to get something, so I'd consider it more of a game balance issue.

 

[Victoria]

so I'd consider it more of a game balance issue.

Not to me, sounds like a bug where the AI has to offer some gold and with no gold in their treasury then then use GPT in which the minimum is 1 GPT instead of 1 gold.
Gold trading seems such a mess, exploit after exploit because they seemed to only code what s necessary rather than rewriting the routine like someone would think.

 

[Thorak]

I was just playing through the Canada gotm as I felt I was messing things up badly with Turkey, and realized that the AI will trade 1gpt for any strategic resource or diplomatic favor if they do not have any gold in their treasury. Needless to say I tried another practice run with that in mind and all 6 AI I've met have given me all of their gold by turn 50. I would say getting 60gpt out of each strategic resource by trading it that way would qualify as an exploit.

I was doing this in the Canada GOTM. I was trading away all my resources and diplomatic favor for the AI gold. I think this might have changed in the latest patch. However, I had to give up that game because at turn 90 or so I had a save which crashed civ6 again and again so I couldn't load it. I tried the autosave the turn before and before that as well but I still couldn't load the game because I had too many 1 gold per turn trade deals with the AI. This got me so annoyed I gave up on that GOTM altogether and stopped playing CIV6 for a while. I am back now though. I realize now I should probably have reported this as a bug as I clearly had several saves which I couldn't load because of this issue.

 

[A_Modern_Major_General]

Victoria,

A further note on how it functions, the AI starts offering 1gpt instead as soon as they have less gold in treasury than they are willing to give; so for strategic resources it is usually just when they have less than 4 gold in treasury.

Thorak,

Thanks for sharing that bit of information. Good to know about the potential save corruption before hand.

 

[Victoria]

A further note on how it functions

Lucky I checked the post, you really need a @ in front of the name for proper notification.
I hate these financial abuses, spending so much time in game doing this just so you can post a game with a better result? I guess if that is what floats your boat.

 

[leif erikson]

What is the best solution? No GPT trades allowed?

 

[Victoria]

It’s a key part of the game and these type of trades have been allowed before.
No trading with civs that have no gold?because it is an exploit, getting gold where there is none.

 

[Monthar]

While practicing for the Canada science game I saw this exploit as well. I pushed it as far as I could. Two things I noticed are; 1)Mouse over on your gpt would show all those 1 gpt deals from the AI and so many that you could no longer see your expenses section; and 2) If you keep making these deals after you cause the expenses to no longer be seen in the aforementioned mouse-over it will hit a point where any action will crash the game and a save at or near that tipping point will also cause the game to crash every time you try to load the save.

Since this exploit only involves selling a single unit of strategic resources or diplomatic favor for 1 gpt, I'd say that's what should be banned. So maybe say no deals with the AI for less than 2 gpt as that's the easiest to check without a working parser.

 

[A_Modern_Major_General]

@Victoria - Thanks for mentioning the tag functionality. Also, thanks for your research over the years. I've been browsing for a long time and you've done some excellent work and I really appreciate it.

@Monthar - I agree, the only part which is an exploit is the trades for 1gpt, which I have just been avoiding now. Trading in single units to avoid the losses to the rounding function is just annoying, but not really broken. That said it would be nice if they just used a round down function instead of a regular rounding function so that it would be beneficial to trade in larger units instead of smaller units.

 

[leif erikson]

Noted in second post. Thank you.

 

[A_Modern_Major_General]

@leif erikson Thanks for the update, the welcome, and all the excellent maps.

 

[Eyswein]

I really hate that they don't fix these trading exploits, it absolutely ruins the game for me. I won't be officially posting a final for the latest 2 science games as I also found this trade "exploit" by accident and wanted to see what the heck was going on and don't think it is a fair comparison.

When I ran into an AI civ with over 150gpt turn output and I wanted to see what would happen with 100+ 1gpt trades (after already trading with a few other AI for ~60gpt this way) -- the game crashed. Basically if I offered everything I had to trade at once, I could get their ~300gold + ~40gpt, but using the trade "bug" I could trade FEWER resources for their ~300g + ~171gpt (except crash time afterwards).

The fluctuation is stupid annoying (to me). When I found the "bug" there was an AI that would give me 3gpt for 20 strategic resources, so about 4.5g per resource over 30 turns. However, if I made another trade first for (almost) all their base gold (generally down to 0-4 gold), the AI would start giving me 1gpt for 1 SR, so 30 gold per resource (vice 4.5gpr!!) over 30 turns. Absolutely insane. Even just programing it to round to 0 (for no trade) if too low would be a decent fix, but appears to truncate to minimum of 1.

A potential game fix would be to set trades so you had to sell strategic resources and diplomatic favor in sets of 10 or more at a time (or in sets of 10 if that is easier to code). This still provides some minor rounding to mess around with if desired, but not the insane game changing exploit that can be done now.

A potentially even easier/better game fix would be to only allow one trade to each AI per turn. This eliminates all the same turn rounding exploits that exist, but still probably allows some slow roll exploits that aren't quite so game changing.

Concur @Monthar solution of no trades <2gpt would be easiest to check and eliminates the most exploitive trades, but really wish they would just fix the game mechanic.

And the maps for the last two games were absolutely awesome and surprising!