EPISTLES

Exploits and Loopholes

February 9, 2002

As I have played this game fairly extensively by now, I've gathered a list of rules/options which are, in my view, questionable. For a reference to what I mean, consider the National Football League (American Football). They review their rules every year, and change a few here or there as they see fit, toward the aim of improving the game. Sometimes they have had to change a rule because a player or team has found a flaw in that rule, some activity or tactic they can use which flies against the spirit intended for the game, but which is not prohibited. The rules are sometimes changed to "close the loophole". One such example was the Offensive False Start, where any movement by an offensive down lineman, after assuming a set position but prior to the start of the play (prior to the snap) was ruled a False Start and penalized. A certain defensive player started deliberately flinching to simulate the start of a play, to trick offensive players into false starting, and he was so effective with it, the rule was changed to forbid this behavior. Now the defense gets penalized for encroachment if they are deemed to have caused a false start.

Frequently, the rules for a game fail to anticipate all possible angles a player might use. Sometimes, finding an unconventional approach that was not anticipated amounts to clever strategy, and sometimes it amounts to exploitation. What's the difference? It comes down to the spirit of the game, which can be elusive, a gray area. For a video game, the game makers are the final arbiter of the rules, at least for the official retail version of the game. Players can often change the rules to their own taste through mods or other means, but those never rise to the same legitimacy as the official version unless they earn some kind of official endorsement as a valid alternative. Most games today are so complex, they get released with flawed rules -- rules that leave open loopholes in the game, which can be found and exploited. Some games, even, do not lend well to the loopholes being closed, because there are so many, that plugging one just springs a leak at another. Some companies don't care enough to continue tweaking/refining the rules through patches, or reach a point where they deem the cost/benefit of further effort to be not worth their time.

Firaxis so far has a solid performance in this regard. The first patch to CivIII made a number of rules changes, many of which were directly aimed at closing loopholes in the gameplay, flaws that could be exploited to an effect definitely far outside the intended spirit of the game. How much farther they will go in closing loopholes and further polishing the rules remains to be seen, but at the moment they have my confidence and full support in this regard. Keep up the good work, Firaxis! Your fans/customers appreciate you for it!

So what are some of the loopholes and exploits in Civ III? I'm going to detail the ones I've found. Whether you want to view this as a cheat sheet of exploit options to use, or a list of rules flaws to be avoided in your own gameplay (out of love for purity of gaming), is up to you.

First, some of the exploits from the original release version which have already been corrected in the 1.16f patch.

A) Lumberjacking. RULE: chop down a forest to receive 10 shields into the nearest city. EXPLOIT: replanting forests with armies of workers and chopping them down repeatedly. WHY THIS IS FLAWED: this aspect was intended to be part of the early game, a one time production bonus to be wisely managed. It was never intended to be an ongoing supplement to production. HOW MUCH I PERSONALLY USED IT: Lots, at least at first (got to be too boring, later). What else to do with surplus workers, especially with industrious civs, after all other tasks complete? Corruption was SO BAD, I almost felt justified using it to soften the costs of rushbuilding a few key improvements at hopelessly corrupt colonies and acquisitions. CORRECTION MADE: rule changed to allow the bonus from only the first time a forest square is chopped down, and corruption effects softened a bit to reduce need for lumberjacking in the first place. One may still lumberjack, by deliberately planting forests and then chopping them back down, but only once per tile. STATUS: fixed. This rule is in good shape now, in my opinion.

B) Selling Cities to the AI's. RULE: you could trade your cities away to the AI's for their techs/cities/resources. EXPLOIT: you could completely ruin the game by building Dummy Cities, parking an army next to them, selling them to the AI then attacking next turn and retaking them at no effort. Do enough of this and the AI was fooled into thinking you were beating them up badly, and they would then even give away their core cities or whatever else you wanted, to make peace. WHY THIS IS FLAWED: obviously, this is just a sucker punch to an unwary, unthinking AI. HOW MUCH I PERSONALLY USED IT: zero. This kind of move may appear clever, but IMO it stabs directly at the heart of the game, and exploitation of it shows flagrant disrespect for the game concept. CORRECTIONS MADE: cities given away in diplomacy by all sides now come with a free defender, of the best quality available in that city (may be less than current best, if the city is not connected by road/harbor to anwwhere), can no longer offer anything to the AI's when they are surrendering cities for peace, can no longer sell your cities to the AI's but only give them away. STATUS: much improved but not entirely fixed yet. There is still an exploit on the table where you can give away captured cities to a third (weak) civ, with whom you have Right of Passage, while you kill off the main target's civ entirely, then come back and mop up the cities you gave away, thus circumventing threat of cultural revolt in those cities and VASTLY reducing your need to maintain garrisons during an ongoing war. These rules need more tweaking.

C) Letting the AI's Build For You. RULE: any city you capture becomes your city. EXPLOIT: the AI's are set up to do nothing BUT expand, in the early game. They expand at all costs, and make for easy targets even at high difficulty once they expanded far enough to outreach their initial allotment of free military. The player could sit back, build a barracks or one or two other cities, all with barracks, and send a pair of veteran units out to attack all kinds of spanking new (lightly defended) AI colonies, and even get them to give away more for free after so much of this. WHY THIS IS FLAWED: It was MORE effective to let the AI's build cities, and go around taking them one after another, than to build your own. This was not intended. HOW MUCH I PERSONALLY USED IT: none. I enjoy the aspect of planning and building my own empire. I'm not entertained by the parasite approach. CORRECTIONS MADE: size 1 cities with no culture are now razed when captured. STATUS: the exploit has been fixed, but I still see the one-size-fits-all one-track-strategy of AI expansionism as flawed. It would be nice if they had other strategies in their arsenal and weren't so bloody predictable. The lack of variation in their behavior is likely to shorten the entertainment value of the game. (It's going to growing stale more quickly than it should).

Now, on to the current loopholes and exploits, the ones still fully active in the 1.16f patch.

1) Overriding Contentment: RULE: buildings, wonders and martial law, which turn unhappy faces into content faces, override any amount of unhappiness, ensuring at least X number of content faces in any city. EXPLOIT: the player may continue to use forced labor, or to draft military units, without end, and without cost/penalty. WHY THIS IS FLAWED: the player is given an unfair advantage over the AI's, who clearly do not exploit this to the degree possible. They may whip some military out for emergency defense when a city is threatened, but otherwise do not use forced labor or the draft. The problem lies in the lack of penalty. There's a cost associated with extreme use of forced labor or the draft, but the happiness priorities are such that, past a certain point, is there is no more cost, only endless free benefit. Thus, this method can be used to artificially inflate the size of the player's army, with all kinds of deliterious effects to the game balance. HOW MUCH I PERSONALLY USE IT: some. I really do not like or enjoy the endless whipping strategy of making a bunch of dummy cities with the sole intention of whipping them for units. Yet there have been times when I have whipped a corrupt, distant colony into the dirt, because my need for units was just that strong and the benefit, frankly, too tempting to pass up. I have also played a couple of games where my whole strategy relied on whipped military -- interesting as an exercise, but would get old fast if that's all I ever did with the game. On the other hand, I've found myself using the Draft Rush more and more. It started with building Shakespeare's Theater in a city with a ton of flood plains and virtually no shields, in one game, and keeping the thing at size 11 and drafting a new unit every turn (because it could muster 20 surplus food). I went on to using it in Apolyton 4, where I had some fishing villages in arctic lands with no production, but which I could draft every turn and keep them at size 6-7 threshold. Next thing I know, I have rugged lands on a new variant game I am playing (my Infantry variant prototype game, with Rome) and I both poprushed one city to death, then ended with FIVE size 7 cities crammed into otherwise useless nooks of my homeland, each drafting on every turn, where I swelled my army up to 500 units in rather a hurry. Somewhere in there, "just a little bit" of exploitation got totally out of hand and I find myself ruining my games (and fun) with it. Isn't that the problem with these exploits, at the root? They ultimately take away from, rather than enhance, the gameplay, and so the rules should be improved to close the loopholes. SUGGESTED FIX: change the happiness priority so content faces are no longer "guaranteed". The penalty for endless forced labor or draft should be continued increased unhappiness, up to and including the point at which there's nothing else you can do besides turn all your citizens in that town into taxmen and let the city starve down to size 1. I would like to see the ability to disband a city also removed, and the AI's would have to be trained to refuse to accept as gift any city with too much unhappiness, to prevent giving them away then recapturing and razing them.

2) Food Preservation Threshold: RULE: when a city grows, if it has a granary, half of its food remains in storage. EXPLOIT: at size 7, half the food is 20 units. If you then build a worker, the city shrinks to size 6, where 20 units fills up the entire box. The city is then set to regrow instantly the following turn. A similar but lesser bonus happens at the size 12-13 threshold. WHY THIS IS FLAWED: there is a cost associated with building workers: your city shrinks in population. This cost is defeated, rendered moot, by the peculiarity of the way food is handled at these thresholds. The AI's aren't trained to take advantage of this, so I presume it's an unintended side effect. HOW MUCH I PERSONALLY USE IT: nonstop! I can't help myself. You might even say large chunks of my strategy are built on this exploit. Still, I think the game would be more fun without it, so I would like to see it plugged. SUGGESTED FIX: change it so that the food that remains in storage is half of what the city had when it grew, not half of what its box holds after it has grown. This would correct any number of other exploits related to various uses of these free/cheap workers, as well.

3) Bait: RULE: the AI's are set to attack any vulnerable assets of the player, as a top priority. Undefended workers are at the top of the "easy targets" list. EXPLOIT: Workers can be used as "bait" to get the already stupid AI to do even stupider things, like ignore your forces and even cities, and attack workers set out as bait instead. WHY THIS IS FLAWED: duh. I'm sure it was intended to punish a player who overreaches offensively, but the result is that the AI, already too weak on defense, throws away its resources on useless moves. HOW MUCH I PERSONALLY USE IT: none. It's too much of a sucker punch. Yet it can be difficult to avoid, as the AI's are SO determined to attack any unguarded workers, they will go to any length. You'd laugh if you could see some of the mazes through my units and territory the AI has woven through to attack some lone worker I thought was out of their reach. Amazing stuff. SUGGESTED FIX: the AI needs to be set to place higher priority on defending its cities. It might also be useful if the AI had multiple responses, perhaps even based on the games "pseudo random" seeding, so that its response is randomized. If the AI always attacks workers, you can use them as bait. If never does, you can ignore defending your workers. If sometimes did this, and sometimes that, the whole thing would turn more interesting.

4) Blitz: RULE: the AI's only increase defenses at a city if attacking units are within two squares. EXPLOIT: park a stack of 3-movement units (cav, panzer, armor) 3 spaces away from the city, with a path open on grass/desert/tundra to get there in one turn. The AI city fails to recognize the threat, and fails to draft/rush additional defenders, making the city even easier than it otherwise would be to capture. WHY THIS IS FLAWED: duh. HOW MUCH I PERSONALLY USE IT: some. I've used it in tournament games, mostly. My private games, purely for my own entertainment, I do tend to blitz multiple cities on one turn, hopping from one to another, but I do not tend to use this "keep out of alert range" exploit to make the first capture easier. I can still roll right over the AI's anyway. SUGGESTED FIX: Their entire defense routine could stand a TON of improvement. At the very least, they need to reach a point at which they deem more than two defenders in larger cities as appropriate (and NOT be set to send them out on useless missions, either). They also need to extend their "threat detection" radius out to three squares, at least for units with three movement points.

5) Razing vs Revolt: RULES: captured cities may revolt and declare allegiance to another civ, based on any number of factors. Any garrison in the city is wiped out if this happens. Players can opt to Raze cities instead, thus circumventing the threat of capturing, with a penalty that extends only to your relations with the civ whose city you just razed. EXPLOIT: you can avoid threat of losing control of a city after capturing it by simply burning it to the ground, killing half the population and turning the other half into slave labor. WHY THIS IS FLAWED: Oh boy, where do I start? The fact that your defending garrison is wiped out if the city revolts is too harsh a penalty, unrealistic and unbalanced. Some situations are so risky in this regard (high culture cities, close to enemy capital), the player would be a FOOL to do anything other than to destroy the city, unless they have 20 to 30 units to pile into the city on garrison. Even THEN, some cities have so much culture going, it's still at risk. So there is a HUGE penalty in the game associated with capturing a city, and virtually none with razing it, murdering millions of virtual civilians, and enslaving the survivors. Sheesh! If that's not out of whack, I don't what would be. HOW MUCH I PERSONALLY USE IT: nonstop. I consider this portion of the rules to be so broken (and so unfun to deal with) that I just follow the path of least resistance, and raze any city I'm not confident (knowing most of the rules involved in city flipping) that I can hold on to it if I capture it. SUGGESTED FIX: first of all, there needs to be a MUCH stiffer penalty for razing a city. Like... war weariness boosted a lot under demo/republic, and a LOT more "global" penalty, diplomatically -- more so under harsher governments, since the world would be even more disapproving of a civ who takes these kinds of actions with no remorse. Reputation ought to suffer, and cost of deals to go up, for a civ who razes cities -- too much razing ought to bring risks like using nukes now do: that other civs might dislike you so much, they declare war. Also, that penalty where your whole garrison is wiped out if a revolt happens MUST GO. Your units should be retreated to four spaces away from the city (or as far as possible, without being forced into the sea), preferably in the direction of your capital, and should all lose one hit point. Ships and planes, and any units who only had one hit point left, are lost. This would put the penalty more in line with reason, and stop giving players rewards for genocide, while penalizing them for honorable treatment of enemy populations.

6) Starvation: RULE: captured cities do not object if you starve them. EXPLOIT: the best way to avoid the dreaded (and overly penalizing) city flip, for captured cities, is to starve their native population down to size 1, to reduce foreign nationals within your city. WHY THIS IS FLAWED: duh. Same as my last point, the game is geared to reward murderous, ruthless, vindictive gameplay, and penalize honorable treatment of the enemy. By design? I don't think so, but it's there nonetheless. You are "rewarded" for not murdering the population of captured cities by an increased risk of revolt. That revolt risk may be appropriate, but the easy out of just starving the people to reduce the risk carries no penalties whatsoever. That's a problem. HOW MUCH I PERSONALLY USE IT: all the time. This whole area of the game is out of whack. It's not just a matter of passing up "rewards" for slimy gameplay, but actually being penalized for honorable gameplay. Hmmph, no thank thee. Until there is more sense in these rules, I'll just continue to do what is expedient. It's only a game. (I just hope this gets improved). SUGGESTED FIX: I don't really know the answer here. I just know that there ought to be some way to gear it, where there are costs to doing dirty business with captured cities, and the penalties for humane treatment of conquered peoples are less harsh. At the VERY least, the two options should be equal. Under no circumstances should it be clearly, unequivocally superior to choose genocide.

7) Betrayal: RULE: the player can betray his diplomatic agreements. EXPLOIT: betrayals are not sufficiently penalized. One can make deals for huge amounts of Gold Per Turn (gpt), then turn around and declare war, reneging on your end of the bargain. Players can reap rewards for peace, like techs and cities, then violate that peace immediately. Players can use Right of Passage to prepare huge sucker punches, moving stacks into position in enemy territory. NONE of these betrayals are penalized sufficiently, nor even anywhere remotely near "appropriate". WHY THIS IS FLAWED: I wouldn't really care about this so much if not for competitions and community events. What someone chooses to do with their copy of a game, up to and including hacking it death, or exploiting it into oblivion, is no concern of mine. BUT... the ease with which these agreements can be betrayed, and the near-total lack of penalty for doing so, pretty much ensures that anybody participating in a public event involving playing Civ III is left with the choice of "exploit" or "be disadvantaged". I find that unfortunate. SUGGESTED FIX: deals lasting 20 turns ought to be contingent on honoring them. For example, peace deals where a player is given cities for peace, because they are beating up on a civ, ought to require the player honor the full 20 turns of the deal. If they betray the agreement, ALL the captured cities ought to instantly revolt back to the original civ, be given TWO free defenders, and destroy all units the player has in those cities. This would still allow the betrayal, but take away the incentive for doing so flippantly. For deals where the gains can't just be handed back (tech, gold), the diplomatic penalties ought to be SEVERE. Past a certain point, no civ on the planet should ever again be willing to enter peace deals with an untrustworthy player: war to the bitter end, for all time. RoP betrayals (which need to be sorted out carefully, so that the game doesn't mistakenly penalize innocent players) ought to permanently close out the option of any civ agreeing to a Right of Passage deal. (I know this would take a chunk of work, as how do you sort out an intentional RoP betrayal, with stacks of units moved next to cities, from someone declaring war with a couple of units on enemy soil but not particularly aiming at raping the AI's trust -- a difficult thing to sort out). Trade Embargoes ought to start happening even among your friends if you act too slimy. Yet for some types of agreements (MPP, Alliance), the 20 turns is frankly too long. It's almost impossible to remain at war that long (in a hot war) under representative government. And oddly enough, the player is penalized FAR MORE for betraying these unbalanced and inflexible agreements than he ever is for openly raping the AI's with betrayal-by-design. I don't have all the answers, here, but I can at least see where the problems lie. I avoid MPP's and most alliances at all costs, because the penalties attached to them aren't worth the advantages gained from them. The risks/rewards for the whole diplomatic spectrum could stand some scrutiny. I'd love to see the option for shorter and longer deals, too (10 turns, 20, 30). That would add even more value/spice to the diplomatic front.

I also find it unfortunate that by the time the Explorer unit comes online, the world has always and inevitably been completely filled. Shouldn't this unit come available with mapmaking? Shouldn't paratroops be allowed to operate (like other air units) out of any city? That would put them on the map. Shouldn't the AI be trained to at least the option of a slightly more sophisticated attack routine than just "attacker/defender pairs" sent beelining willy nilly toward the nearest targets? Shouldn't there a be SOME point at which the AI's, in their defense routines, opt to use attacker-type units on defense? Some knights defending in cities would sure slow down the horsie rush in the medieval age -- or should the whole always-retreat-safely option for fast vs slow units be re-evaluated? It is awfully strong. I don't find these last couple of issues to be loopholes, but something about them is out of whack. :)

I know this is not an exhaustive list, but I think I've covered the ten worst exploits in the game, why I believe they are harmful, and what might be done about it. The rest, as they say, is out of my hands.

Best Wishes,

- Sirian

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