Problems with the current rules in MP

DrFell · May 23, 2002, 21:51

Thinking over the current rules, I have found a few little loopholes which might be exploited by players, and would take a lot out of the game.

1 - Abandoning cities
Ok, everyone wants our cities to be manageable when it's not our turn, to speed the game up in turn based mode. But, what if the 'abandon city' option were available at all times? Imagine you're being attacked in the early game by a large army. You have more cities, but he has lots of units and lots to gain by capturing your cities. What would I do in that situation? I'd wait until the last unit in every city fell, and abandon them one by one. This way he is gaining nothing (but free land) and in a 4-way that could mean he's behind all game, especially if he's on an island and can't transport those units anywhere else. Conquering would be worthless and the game would boil down to a few empires racing for wonders and down the tech tree.

To fix it? Just make it so that cities cannot be abandoned until the turn after you order them so.

2 - Drafting/Pop rushing
Very similar to abandon city, basically when the city gets attacked keep drafting(if it's allowed when it's not your turn) or pop rushing units. If you know you're going to lose the city, you might as well screw your opponent. The attacker inherits a size 1 city with huge unhappiness which will never be gotten rid of.

To fix it, prevent drafting except on your turn, and remove pop rushing inherited unhappiness.

Anyone think of any other loopholes?

Inverse Icarus · May 24, 2002, 00:04

well, they fixed an exploit i saw before, when you gave a city to an ally they got a defensive unit in it, so you could have switched back and forth and got a ton of free units. but again, they fixed that.

one thing i dont like is the simultaneous / turnless mode, i see it as one big problem for civ. imagine having 2 people converging on on city... on the same turn... before you could rally defenses etc... i hink the whole game goes to hell, but i havent seen it yet so i wont jugde it completely

one flaw i see with the current rules is what i do to AI civs i dont like. i offer them a luxury good that i have 0 extra of. i ask for cold hard cash up front. i then move a bunch of workers to the square with the luxury resource, and then i use units to pillage it.

the trade deal is broken and i can rebuild the road and use my own resource.

the AI gets REEEEEEAL mad when you do this, but with human players you could say it was an enemy bombing or something...

DrFell · May 24, 2002, 09:54

I suppose the resource thing isn't so explotative though, just an exploiting a dumb player

- I wouldn't pay up a lump sum of cash for a resource anyway, unless it was with a really trusted player.

I've tried sim and it doesn't work too bad in civ2. Only problem is the host, and players with better connections tend to move faster than anyone else. This would have to be fixed for sim unless you were on a fast network of some sort.

DrFell · May 26, 2002, 12:40

Suprised no one else has replied, having rule loopholes in the released version could really spoil MP (turning it into an all out war game with no building up, or into nothing but a wonder race game, remember the rules that work good in SP may be open to exploits in MP). Come on people, think over the current game rules! What would not work in MP?