What should we consider as exploits?

[leif erikson]

Yes, it is because the AI cannot understand that cities gifted to it will cause it to lose. So we made a specific rule for religious victories that you cannot gift cities.
Please see the exploits thread for more information.

 

[Soger]

I have a question about the rules, it says city gifting is an exploit for religious victory but is it still allowed for other VC like this ones SV?

If you have to ask it’s probably cheating.

There is no “natural” viable reason to gift a city to a opponent.

Yes there is many bonuses that can be achieved through the gifting of cities outside of winning a religious victory.

But if you are going to gift a city to abuse those mechanics what is the point in playing a challenge game?

 

[Airey]

If you have to ask it’s probably cheating.
There is no “natural” viable reason to gift a city to a opponent.

I have a different view on this to share.
To some degree, there's no "natural" logical reason for the AI to buy lux at 10+ GPT in the early game.
Who has that much cash in the stone age. Cave man probably don't know what to do with that lux anyways.

Other than religious victory, there are 2 main use for gifting city, one is to pillage another is to steal AI settler.

1. For pillaging, the player also have to go through the decision making process of how to allocate his resources (hammer/gold/faith). Do I make go wide with settlers, go tall with districts, or pillage with military? It still cost resources to make units to take the city back, while delaying expansion. Pillaging make district costs go up, require more investment to upgrade military, unit upkeep cost. These are the problems player have to overcome and balance. It does not necessary net you a fast game.
2. To steal an early deity AI settler by gifting city, the player needs to ① quick settlement，and ② get military units early (rush buy or levy). And lose a trading partner for a short period of time. Is all this worth netting a 440g/560g settler?

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

I agree with @kcd_swede unlike other exploits, both methods, the player is trading opportunity cost for the immediate gain.


We'll just discuss and follow the game rule under the exploits thread, let the staff decide.

 

[ValleTomate]

Should it be considered an exploit to gift cities also outside of Religious Victories? By Gifting away cities and declaring war on the recipiants you can intentionally create pillages for yourself, that can be mine pillages for gold or, very commonly pillaging fully build campuses and IZ's at the end of a science game in order to finish the tech tree in one go.

I think it's fine as it requires a lot of deliberate planning and is like a high level strategy for SV Speedruns but what is the consens here?

 

[leif erikson]

Moderator Action: Have moved the discussion of gifting cities to this thread as it does not belong in an Announcement thread. Comparing things considered as exploits or pointing out dumb mechanics isn't fruitful. Each has its own set of positives and negatives. If you wish to discuss why something we consider an exploit should be reconsidered, please do so on the merits of the issue, not by comparison.

 

[MaddAddams]

The pillaging thing I get, but gifting a city to the AI to steal a Settler I'm having a hard time understanding how it's even supposed to work

 

[Soger]

Should it be considered an exploit to gift cities also outside of Religious Victories? By Gifting away cities and declaring war on the recipiants you can intentionally create pillages for yourself, that can be mine pillages for gold or, very commonly pillaging fully build campuses and IZ's at the end of a science game in order to finish the tech tree in one go.

I think it's fine as it requires a lot of deliberate planning and is like a high level strategy for SV Speedruns but what is the consens here?

This is the exact reason I record all my games. There is a few things in game that are so simple and absolutely game breaking.

It really takes zero effort/strategy to create a pillage city system. Anyone arguing that is kidding themselves.

I specifically did not explain why gifting cities is so strong for this reason. It’s harder to see in a save that it happened if a player tries to hide it and it’s done in moderation.

So yeah if you feel it’s viable do it thing to do in a mostly honor based community game I guess that’s your thing.

 

[Airey]

It really takes zero effort/strategy to create a pillage city system. Anyone arguing that is kidding themselves.

Yet all the speed runs ( t80ish for science victory) favors peaceful game. The fastest SV pillaging win I've seen is t90ish.
It's just an alternative method to win, to win under 100 turns either way takes good planning and execution, to dismiss it as "zero effort" is just laughable.
The two empires looks vastly different. It it "so easy" that nobody on the forum has successfully figure out how to abuse the pillaging system to get fast win time.
The merit is ① to be able to produce enough military to sustain many cycles early enough (around t50)，and ② to be able to balance diplomacy.
It's easy if one only looks at the pillage gains, it's hard to do it fast. Same as peaceful game, more cities faster win.
The developer kept pillage system in there and haven't change it (nor the scaling) for awhile.
Obviously, HoF aren't flooded with pillage winning games.

Mass chopping settlers are also taking the advantage of the system -- little efforts result in massive rewards.
And settler spam requires alot of strategy? They're just different ways to play the game.
I think it's great for players to keep pushing the limit and think outside the box.

So far gifting city is only banned for Religious Victory. So it's honorable to be doing replays and dishonorable to play within the rule?...okie, if you say so.
It's probably more constructive making a case to your point, rather than "I think" thus conclude one method is superior than others.

 

[Chrumo]

So this is only my perspective and my opinion on GotMs, but here it is:
All we are really doing here when playing GotM is speedruning the game. As much as it may sound weird, we are all speedrunners!

The important thing about speedrunning is to establish a ruleset under which the challenge stands. And in our case, the rules are always:

1. Win a given victory type for a given seed (save)
2. No reloads or any prior knowledge of the map past turn 1
3. No gifting of cities in Religious Victory games

There is nothing else. As Leif mentioned, we could list exploits for days, but they are allowed as the metagame has evolved around them. These include 'pillage-flipping', getting free diplomatic favor for the first 30 turns, making abusive GPT deals and breaking them immedietly with a war, ambushing lone settlers/workers and declaring peace 10 turns later, making ludicrous deals for joint wars, selling early luxuries for unreasonablle amounts of gold... none of these mechanics was implemented intentionally, and if Firaxis could single-handedly fix these issues before they released Civ6, they probably would. As I said, at this point fixing them would just shuffle the metagame without really making playing Civ6 any more enjoyable (getting mounds of gold is undoubtly enjoyable!).

Now when there were some extreme gamebreaking bugs, such as queue abusing and production overflow, these warranted adding temporary rules, which were lifted once the bug was fixed by Firaxis.

Moreover, I definitely wouldn't call anyone who doesn't adhere to other arbitrary rules (such as prohibition of pillage farms) dishonorable or a cheater. This is a very relaxed enterprise, and at the end of the day we all just gather around a single save to have a stab at it. Verification is impossible, there are no prizes, no winners, the point is just to have fun. Albeit with an added sprinkle of competetiveness granted by the loose ruleset mentioned above.

So I think this thread is mostly to discuss whether we should add something to the abovementioned list. I don't think there is an overwhelming issue of people abusing the pillage mechanics, and adding it could confuse new players. The more rules, the more obscure the challange.

 

[Airey]

The pillaging thing I get, but gifting a city to the AI to steal a Settler I'm having a hard time understanding how it's even supposed to work

an example from Gotm 117,

• use a builder to block Dido from settling her 2nd city.

• at Immortal the AI gets a free builder once he/she gets a 2nd city (settled or acquired),
• better in Deity as AI grants 1 settler and 1 builder, which enables player to setup 4 core cities by t30.

• in 6 turns the city will rebel and you can take it back with the 2 warriors.
• with no Joint War, no breaking deals for lump of gold, the economy @ t24,
• the trade off is ① delayed development for our 2nd city，and ② Dido will be in terrible shape, there will be less gold to milk from Dido entering classical (1st golden age).
• It'll likely delay player's expansion phase depending on victory condition. This is why I suspect peaceful games results in fast win because AIs' cash are there to support player's rapid expansion.
• In most cases, it is not worthwhile.

File is attached.

 

[MaddAddams]

Thanks for the explanation. Seems like a lot of set up that won't even work on many maps and can go south badly if you don't quite pull it off.

 

[Airey]

Thanks for the explanation. Seems like a lot of set up that won't even work on many maps and can go south badly if you don't quite pull it off.

You're welcome. Usually I expand normally and keep this on the back of my mind, re-assess when the situation arise. It requires an AI not settling down their 2nd city 20 turns into the game, not something we can control.

Regarding to selling/gifting cities for other victory types.

The pros and cons are as follow:

1. Science & Diplomatic victories
   • depleting AIs from setting up a healthy economy system in Ancient era, means there will be less cash available in Classical.
   • more cash by t30 to help setting up core cities.
2. Domination
   • the early economic war will aid the player when attacking AI cities.
   • early cash can help buying wood lands to chop horsemen rush.
3. Culture
   • I am not an expert on culture
   • early cash to buy buildings, free up queue to cycle projects, earning cheap classical Great Writers.
   • early economic war means weakening AIs' culture defense.

For longer games (ie >100 turns) selling/gifting cities probably hurts more. For fast ending games (domination & culture <100t), it benefits the player more.

Regarding pillaging and repeatably farming the same cities, the resources (hammer or levy & upgrade) to get military required probably is more efficiently used on developing more cities and more campuses + science buildings early on (before t80) for science victory. Except for Babylon, he can use cash to rush-buy and complete eurekas and techs.

My understanding of an exploit is something that allows players to get fast wins by getting an overwhelming advantage (ie the hammer overflow & unlimited settler). Since goal of Gotm win by the fewest turn possible. If it doesn't result in fast win, it doesn't really matter if we ban or not. Even joint wars and breaking deals for lump of gold will cost the player down the road. The diplomacy penalty is minor, the lack of cash to milk from AI is the problem.

 

[ValleTomate]

This is the exact reason I record all my games. There is a few things in game that are so simple and absolutely game breaking.

It really takes zero effort/strategy to create a pillage city system. Anyone arguing that is kidding themselves.

I specifically did not explain why gifting cities is so strong for this reason. It’s harder to see in a save that it happened if a player tries to hide it and it’s done in moderation.

So yeah if you feel it’s viable do it thing to do in a mostly honor based community game I guess that’s your thing.

It depends, something like pillage flipping (which actually doesn't have to do with gifting cities), farming Liberations on John Curtin or farming Eurekas on Alex are very simple and op strategies to the degree that I could see it being classified as exploit.
But gifting away Cities in general, to create pillages in a large scale is not trivial to do in such a way that it's actually helping win the game faster. It takes building cities in a specific way, it takes farming promotions on cavalry and then paying the opportunity cost of not using them on the AI directly and it takes building roads/railroads in order to be truly efficent.
A lot of those are game long commitments and the reward of pillaging will always clash with the opportunity cost of destroying your own cities and occupying your millitary.
Now when you commit to it well it's clearly a very strong strategy that will always speed up the victory and I can definitly see how people can dislike it, but saying it takes zero effort is just wrong.

 

[A. mexicanum]

Found a new one (at least I have not seen it mentioned anywhere), and it probably doesn't need to be mentioned since it is obviously more a cheat then an exploit and involves a mod, but I will do it anyway:

The mod in question is Quick Deals, which is (supposed to be) just a UI mod and I believe pretty common. It is about selling strategic resources.
When you use the mod you can just put in the kind and amount of resources you want to sell. You can do so by clicking on the icon on the left repeatedly, or click on the symbol in the middle and put the amount in via keyboard that you want to sell. If you put a number bigger then your available resources, it automatically gets reduced to your stockpile.

After I sold to Nubia, I have 44 Iron left (50 -20 I sold, +14 I got this round, this how the game works and still correct. The screenshot below is what you automatically get after clicking accept deal in the screenshot above.

You can trade the rest of the iron, and increase the amount again by clicking on the symbol on the left, or via clicking on the symbol in the middle and writing the number down you want to trade. And here is the kicker. If you use the method of clicking in the middle and putting your number in, the maximum you can trade is not what you actually have left, but the amount you had before you made your first trade. In this instance 50.

Again, selling 40 to Gaul. The next "suggested" deal shows "10" iron in the middle (50 now - the sold 40), even though we have only 4 left, and by clicking in the middle and putting anything in we want, we get limited to our original limit of 50, even though we only have 4 instances of iron left. (as can be seen on the left side).

If we had more AI interested in buying, we could repeat this process several times more, even though we would have no Iron left.
This works with all strategic resources. But only if you have more in stock than you want to sell, because it only works if the "suggested" deal in the middle is still available after we accepted a deal. If I would close the deal in the middle in the above screenshot, click on the iron icon to the left (and open a new deal proposal) the new maximum amount would now be our actual supply of 4. Also meaning if we only had 40 Iron and an AI would want to buy all, there would be no "suggested" deal in the middle left and the process would stop.

Since (I believe) AI never wants to buy more then 40 resources at a time, you can always do this once you have 41 instances of one resource (there will always be a "suggested" deal of at least "1", which you can then increase again). I believe I sold 200+ niter at one time in my last game, even though my stockpile was just 50 at that time.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Found a new one (at least I have not seen it mentioned anywhere), and it probably doesn't need to be mentioned since it is obviously more a cheat then an exploit and involves a mod, but I will do it anyway:

That sounds like a bug in the QuickDeals Mod rather than an exploit.

 

[leif erikson]

This is one of the reasons we do not like to see participants using mods.

 

[Airey]

Even without mod, players can milk off the AI by repeatedly buying and selling one AI strategic resources.
(ie. AI buys at 18 GPT and sells at 14 GPT). This cycle can be started as soon as either an AI or player has 40 in stock with enough GPT.

There are many ways to get early cash "legally" or "unethically." It's pretty hard to ban all of them.
Ultimately, it's the player's decision of how to use this "extra cash" (buy settler/builder/land/building) that determines if the game will end early.