Two Questions - Governor and Upkeep Cheat

[T-hawk]

1. How do you see who is the current Planetary Governor? Sometimes I forget after picking up a savegame I haven't played in a while.

2. You're not supposed to be able to view/edit cities during the upkeep/production cycle, but it's possible by hitting F4 and then double-clicking on a city from there. If the city hasn't produced yet this turn, you can change what it's going to produce. This can be exploited by, for example, having your SSC discover Superstring Theory; then having a Skunkworks-equipped base rush-build a prototype of the Chaos Gun; then having the base you just captured in enemy territory rush-buy a Chaos-equipped unit, all on the same turn.

Is this known? Is it considered cheating?

[Chowlett]

Originally posted by T-hawk
1. How do you see who is the current Planetary Governor? Sometimes I forget after picking up a savegame I haven't played in a while.

Sorry, I don't believe it's possible

2. You're not supposed to be able to view/edit cities during the upkeep/production cycle, but it's possible by hitting F4 and then double-clicking on a city from there. If the city hasn't produced yet this turn, you can change what it's going to produce. This can be exploited by, for example, having your SSC discover Superstring Theory; then having a Skunkworks-equipped base rush-build a prototype of the Chaos Gun; then having the base you just captured in enemy territory rush-buy a Chaos-equipped unit, all on the same turn.

Is this known? Is it considered cheating?

I did not know this. Verrrrry interesting. It should probably be considered cheating from the point of view of "The game engine is not designed to let you do it" - but OTOH, the AI does almost every turn, and presumably you can only do it if there's an event dialogue on the screen. I would say cheating myself, the game's easy enough as it is, but I would say it's more a personal call than most of the others.

BTW - there's already an "Upkeep Bug" - in an earlier version, maintenance for facilities was for some reason divided by 3 on Transcend difficulty. We need another name for this one then.

[MariOne]

Chowlett, I have always seen that bug referred to as "Maintenance Bug". It had effect also at Thinker level, where you had 33% off of your maintenance expenditures, instead of 66% as at Transcend.
The "earlier" version you're talking of it's... SMAC itself!
There are many bugs which were fixed in SMAX or in SMAXv2, but they never produced a SMACv5 patch exporting those fixes to the original game (incidentally, this is one of the main reasons why I dislike FurXs).
The Maintenance bug has been fixed in SMAXv2, but it's till there in SMACv4 (that is, even if you apply the SMAX expansion on it, the terran.exe file remains the same, old bugs included).

Now, if you regard SMAC as "just" an early version of SMAX... I know many players who never bought SMAX because they were not interested in *paying* for basically an expansion and a patch. (I got it, but only use it for pbems with the original 7 SMAC factions)
____


What T-Hawk is suggesting, is this:

While during the preliminary Upkeep/Updates phase a basewindow pops up because you completed a facility there (or for any other reason you set in Ctrl+W optin screen), if you click on the big left/right arrows to browse thru the other bases management windows, that game tells you
OPERATIONS DIRECTOR: "That funcion is not permitted during upkeep"
At that point you can tho, using the F4 Screen, switch to other bases which Updates must be perfomed yet, and change/impart orders on the fly, profiting of the knowledge you just acquired, before those bases actually perform their beginning-of-turn updates...

Well...
Seeing taht there is a message explicilty denying you that, it shouldn't belong to the game.
Besides, that's an EVIDENT interface programming flaw. Here everyone's striving to pu limitations on the game because playing against the AI it's waaaay to easy and not interesting.
Would you feel yourself smart taking an advantage against a coumputer player because the producer were so dumb to forget to put a filter code alnd left the backdoor open for soemthing they were explicitly forbidding from the front door?
Would you feel satisfied to beat a crappy AI thanks to those unrequired tricks?
(Chowlett, do you really still take as paradigm of what is correct doing, the things the AI does? Is the AI skill your reference? We know that the AI liblerally cheats, despite their claims, they were to able yet do design one which could decently match humans without cheating. A "cheating" human beats the purpose itself of a cheating AI... )

Anyway, In single player, that's an issue of what you want to find in a game. The concept of "cheating" does not even apply to single player, it's you against yourself, or rather taking your time to get fun.

Completely different thing it would be in MultiPlayer (PBEMs, I can't say whether it still applies to IP games).
It would OF COURSE be considered a cheat.
You'd be taking advantage of an error in the interfacte, that another player is NOT supposed to even *imagine*, let alone finding it out accidentally on his own.
Of course as well, in any activity where you have to agree beforehand about the rules you'll have to follow, if you make sure that all the players of each specific pbem you play in are aware of the bug, and if you convince them to determine that exploiting that bug is allowed in that pbem, that is not a cheat.

BUT, but...
That trick DOES NOT function in pbems, because in pbems the basewindows DO NOT pop up regardless of the Warnings you set in the Ctrl+W screen (at least that's the behavior I always experienced, someone was saying that it might be a random-hit bug, installation-dependent...).
So, there's no way in a pbem that you can interject your actions during the preliminary upkeep phase, and there's no possibility to cheat exploiting that bug.

Thank you for pointing out tho, we never end to find out new things that those incredibly crappy programmers FurXians are, let pass thru their useless debug filters...

[Chowlett]

Originally posted by MariOne
Chowlett, I have always seen that bug referred to as "Maintenance Bug".

Ok, my mistake

The "earlier" version you're talking of it's... SMAC itself!

Now, if you regard SMAC as "just" an early version of SMAX...

No, I don't - I just couldn't remember where it was. I had an inkling it was either fixed in Smac v4 or still there in Smax v1. Evidently not.

What T-Hawk is suggesting, is this:

While during the preliminary Upkeep/Updates phase a basewindow pops up because you completed a facility there (or for any other reason you set in Ctrl+W optin screen), if you click on the big left/right arrows to browse thru the other bases management windows, that game tells you
OPERATIONS DIRECTOR: "That funcion is not permitted during upkeep"
At that point you can tho, using the F4 Screen, switch to other bases which Updates must be perfomed yet, and change/impart orders on the fly, profiting of the knowledge you just acquired, before those bases actually perform their beginning-of-turn updates...

Thanks - I wasn't entirely sure where we were meaning. I thought he meant you could do it, for example, if you gained a tech, or if (if for some unknown reason you wanted to) a forest expanded. (Btw, I'm sure I never used to get pop-ups about that, and now I cajn't turn them off. )

Seeing taht there is a message explicilty denying you that, it shouldn't belong to the game.
Besides, that's an EVIDENT interface programming flaw.

Agreed. Definitely, therefore, a bug. I was unaware of that message, I've never tried to do that before.

Here everyone's striving to pu limitations on the game because playing against the AI it's waaaay to easy and not interesting.
Would you feel yourself smart taking an advantage against a coumputer player because the producer were so dumb to forget to put a filter code alnd left the backdoor open for soemthing they were explicitly forbidding from the front door?
Would you feel satisfied to beat a crappy AI thanks to those unrequired tricks?
(Chowlett, do you really still take as paradigm of what is correct doing, the things the AI does? Is the AI skill your reference? We know that the AI liblerally cheats, despite their claims, they were to able yet do design one which could decently match humans without cheating. A "cheating" human beats the purpose itself of a cheating AI... )

Not at all to all questions. The AI is easy enough as it is. Hell, I never beat Civ2 on King level, but I can do SMAX on Transcend with my eyes shut! And my analysis of "level of cheating of this bug" was formed on incomplete info of what happens if you try to do it the "front-door" way.

[T-hawk]

Anybody know if the Maintenance Cost bug also applies to the AIs? If so, one could just triple the maintenance costs of everything in alpha.txt and you'd be back to normal on Transcend.

As for the Upkeep bug, I realized a very important use of it: when you discover Self-Aware Machines, and the AI just produced two Planet Busters. Change to a later base and RUSH an ODP.

I'm still not sure if it's cheating, since the AI definitely does it. I was fighting Yang, and was keeping a close eye on one of his bases that was building a PB, which had 4 turns to go. I click Turn Complete, and gape in disbelief as the "impenetrable" base I had on his turf (perimeter, aerospace, tachyon, three AAA and ECM 1-6-1s, several copters to destroy attackers, three defensive probe teams) vanishes in a giant explosion! He did not have any other PBs, as confirmed from the Security Nexus info-screen. So he must have rush-built the PB during his upkeep. If the AI is going to cheat, so will I.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by T-hawk
He did not have any other PBs, as confirmed from the Security Nexus info-screen. So he must have rush-built the PB during his upkeep. If the AI is going to cheat, so will I.

Nope, it is soooo much more satisfying to kill the AI legitimately. I accept that the AI needs all kinds of cheats to even come close to being an interesting opponent in the standard game set-up.


As for this feature/bug it strikes me as being somewhat similar in result as the Design workshop bug. If you play(as most people do in MP) that you cannot upgrade and subsequently move a unit on the same turn then the same logic should hold here. In addition, if I understand this right, the availability of this is dependent on a number of things that mean that it might not be equally available to all players . Sounds like a bug and cheat to me to me and the only way I would ever even contemplate using this would be if it were agreed explicitly before the PBEM started so that everyone understood it. In a SP game, I agree with the poster that said, any person can play any way they want . . . personally I look for handicaps to impose on myself, not "bugs" to make the game even easier.

[MariOne]

Flubber,
I STRONGLY disagree about calling the feature of upgrading a design from within the DW a "bug".

I think this is a blatant example of what I call "the Apolyton puritanism", not implying with this anything personal about you, and caring to point out that I'm all except easygoing regarding bugs.

Anything strange is deemed a bug here.
I think a more articulated analysis of each separate issue is preferrable.

Upgrading a "single unit" and upgrading a "whole unit design" are two variants of the same concept, but two quite distinct variants, having each one its reasons, and a tradeoff in terms of what each one allows or restricts.
Upgrading a design implies upgrading at the same time all the units of that design, implies having the cash available for the WHOLE operation, implies a less favorable handling of the involved units morale. Implies transforming the production of the underway units to the upgraded model, this meaning that if you want to revert one base back to the basic model production you have to pay the retooling penalty in that base.
Besides, the same mechanism is already present in the game, when you discover a new reactor (or also a new tech if you have properly set your game preferences).
Denying the possibility of upgrading a whole design, takes away a valuable option from the game, a perfectly legal one, motivated and making sense in terms of game desing.
Eventually, if you want to make its handling easier for the average player, you might add a house rule to restrict the timing of its usage (as most people indeed do in MP). But denying it altogether is NOT justified.

So, if you state that upgrading from the DW it's a bug, that's your completely personal *opinion*.
In my opinion, its is not, I sustain that opinion with articulated argumentations shared by many exeprienced players, and also I have the personal opinion that considering it a bug is tipically narrow-minded.
This all, always as a general concept and having nothing specifically personal against you.
Indeed I warmly agree with you when you say "...the only way I would ever even contemplate using this would be if it were agreed explicitly before the PBEM started so that everyone understood it. In a SP game, I agree with the poster that said, any person can play any way they want . . . ", those are sensible words from you, they should be the base of any ruling abot bugs and cheats.


So, I think that you can compare the two issues only superficially.
In the case of the DW, you have indeed an explicit message denying a technique, but the alternative is a variant applying to a different domain, withits reasons to exist and to be considered independently.
In the case of this Upkeep Browsing Bug, you obtain exactly the same effect, ther's no difference at all, just a loophole in coding.
Always IMHO.