I think i may have a new strategy???

[Lucarse]

Then again maybe not but check this out i call it my 'Soak Up' Strategy. Only to be used in when in very serious do do.

A bit of background :
Just finished messy drawn out war with egypt (started with cav ended with tanks!!) managed to take all of egypt by seletive razing and keeping cities, so i'm strung out across the pan asia continent, culture getting bashed, have 20 or so tanks left .
Focusing on the battle front forgetting the little people and my lovely civ goes into anarchy (i know careless of me).

At this point my old mate cesar decides to have a go at me BIG TIME! (i had an alliance but obvioulsy it was over by this point) i lose 90% of my tanks in the first assault, i think 'surely i blunted his attack he can't have that much left', one quick check with my spy and sure enough he has 36 tanks left! next turn they all came in at once!! (i had lost faith in the AI for not attaking properly ie en mass this restored my faith quickly).

I lose two border towns very quickly, now he encroches on one of my large producer cities, i'm in serious trouble no offensive units left,i cannot rush any units as i am in anarchy... because i have a large city base i have economised on defence 2 units in border towns everywhere else 1.

Do i lay down and die...no!! i have 30+ workers and knowing the AI goes out of its way to capture workers i set about surrounding my city with workers!!. This soaks up the AI's turns and gives me 2-3 turns breathing space!! i rush in some defensive units (i borrowed fom other cities)

Pretty soon my anarchy is up i rush about 20+ units and in a few turns I get my workers back plus 2 roman cities !!, not a bad turn around considering the massive attack i was under!.
I subsequently get modern armour(synth fibers) and take rome in about 9 turns, it cost me a bit but it was worth it!

What does everyone think?? has this been tried before? am i telling the more experianced of you to suck eggs??

[vondrack]

I haven't heard about exactly such a use... but it is well known that the AI will go after your workers, so it is being used from time to time.

Anyway, this is something I would probably consider if desperate enough. Even though someone might have come with a better solution, it worked for you, which makes it valid tactics.

EDIT: didn't read the original post carefully enough... snipped portion of my response that were dumb

[Lucarse]

as a side issue anybody seen the AI behave like this?.
It was very intelligent waiting until i was almost defenseless, anarchy etc... then attacking with LARGE numbers of tanks?

or was it a terrible co-incidence ??

[Kampus majore]

Well, usually the AI DOES consider if you are weak or not. And at that point you were vulnerable! I have seen this happen as well....

Could be useful strategy, but you must be sure you will recover later on to take them back again! And also you probably need railroad in order to get the workers there in time.

[jshelr]

This is an exploit, IMHO. We know the AI should not be focused on workers at a point well after RR has already been constructed. Taking advantage of this error to get your posterior out of a sling is OK, if you want, but you would be more satisfied, perhaps, with duking it out "fairly."

[Lucarse]

This is an exploit, IMHO. We know the AI should not be focused on workers at a point well after RR has already been constructed. Taking advantage of this error to get your posterior out of a sling is OK, if you want, but you would be more satisfied, perhaps, with duking it out "fairly."

I do take your point and agree!! as for duking it out fair and square,..there was no duking it out to be done!! by the time i got my sh*t together they would have been knocking on my palace door!!!
I think of it as my version of the anit tank trap!!.

[thorpey]

Originally posted by Lucarse

.....
Do i lay down and die...no!! i have 30+ workers and knowing the AI goes out of its way to capture workers i set about surrounding my city with workers!!. This soaks up the AI's turns and gives me 2-3 turns breathing space!! i rush in some defensive units (i borrowed fom other cities)
.....

You can also use this strategy to stop someone from landing on your shores.
You spot a transport near your coast and line the shore
with workers etc until you have the chance to get a ship
over to sink the transport.

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by Lucarse
Pretty soon my anarchy is up i rush about 20+ units and in a few turns I get my workers back plus 2 roman cities !!

You are lucky! The AIs have always disbanded my workers or hung their heads on the stake immediately
after they capture them. I rarely see my workers alive for more than one turn; they usually give me no chance to rescue them.

[Lucarse]

Really? i almost always get them back?.
They do shove them off back into their own territory as fast as they can whip them!.

I ususally find them a few cities in...unless they are their own ? either way i get them back :-)

I love the way civs provoke me in such a way the only way to satisfy their transgression is to wipe evey speck of their civ into the sea.

[vmxa1]

I have not seen them keep your workers alive in quite a long time. In fact the AI no lnger goes after workers in the way it use to. It would, in the past veer off to grab a worker, you could suck it into coming for them and then smash it. That does not seem to happen any more. It will ignore a lone worker in favor of an attack on troops/cities. Anyway I tend to keep workers from the front line, unless they are covered by a unit.

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by Lucarse
Really? i almost always get them back?.
They do shove them off back into their own territory as fast as they can whip them!.

I ususally find them a few cities in...unless they are their own ? either way i get them back :-)

It probably have something to do with getting them back safely into their own territory. Since most of the time, they capture my workers two tiles within my border (I'm very careful with my workers but once in awhile, they manage to send their cavalries over to capture my workers while I'm not looking), they know that they have no chance of moving those worker back into their own territory and those cavalries are as good as dead, but they do it anyway. Since the AIs know that I will kill all of their invading cavalries and rescue my workers in the next turn, so they decide to kill all of my workers first.

[JohnM2433]

Originally posted by thorpey
You can also use this strategy to stop someone from landing on your shores.
You spot a transport near your coast and line the shore
with workers etc until you have the chance to get a ship
over to sink the transport.

It really should be possible for any unit with an attack value to do an anphibious asault against a unit with no defense value (or an undefended city). Why should those defenseless workers prevent troops from making land?

[Barchan]

Originally posted by JohnM2433

It really should be possible for any unit with an attack value to do an anphibious asault against a unit with no defense value (or an undefended city). Why should those defenseless workers prevent troops from making land?

Good Lord, man, those workers have shovels! *I* certainly wouldn't want to mess with them.

Seriously, though, this strategy is easily defeated by building a Marine or two. It may be a cheap exploit to justify the need for Marines in the game in the first place, but it's easily defeated nevertheless.

[thorpey]

Originally posted by Barchan


Good Lord, man, those workers have shovels! *I* certainly wouldn't want to mess with them.

Seriously, though, this strategy is easily defeated by building a Marine or two. It may be a cheap exploit to justify the need for Marines in the game in the first place, but it's easily defeated nevertheless.

Have you seen the AI make amphibious assaults? I haven't.

Anyway, it's a strategy/exploit that I haven't used, but always good to have up your sleeve if you are really caught short with
your pants down.

[des-esseintes]

Jesus, you actually get gameplay satisfaction from fooling the incompetent AI with such cheap tricks? It's akin to cheating in solitaire.

Wait until MP comes out, and then play it. Myself, i stopped playing vanilla Civ3 after my 3rd game or so, when I realized what a jackass the AI was. And giving it percentile boosts in production and research doesn't make it any tougher IMO..

[thorpey]

Originally posted by des-esseintes
Jesus, you actually get gameplay satisfaction from fooling the incompetent AI with such cheap tricks? It's akin to cheating in solitaire.

Wait until MP comes out, and then play it. Myself, i stopped playing vanilla Civ3 after my 3rd game or so, when I realized what a jackass the AI was. And giving it percentile boosts in production and research doesn't make it any tougher IMO..

No, I said I hadn't used such 'cheap tricks', you shouldn't
need to anyway. It's a last resort I've never needed.

If the game allows something then why is it an exploit
anyway? It is a game after all...

[jshelr]

Exploit Defined: You know you've done it when you've done it.

Confession: Playing Egypt against killer civ Greece, I got tanks first. Greece had something like $20,000 gold and lots and lots of cities. I proceeded to take cities and leave them lightly defended. Greece would then send over a couple of cavs and take them back. Each repeated takeover resulted in something like $300/400 gold. A nice little income resulted that let me build a tech lead while taking down the only large civ left on the map. Was this gradual torture of Greece an exploit. Yes. A perfect AI would see what was happening and stick to defending the cities that it might save. I felt bad about the win and had therefore wasted my own time. Stupid. Exploits are stupid because they spoil your own fun.

[Lucarse]

Originally posted by Barchan
Good Lord, man, those workers have shovels! *I* certainly wouldn't want to mess with them.

nice one.... oh no marines holding sticks with nails in them...run away ........

Maybe their should be a 'scare the crap out of them' or surrender feature?
30 tanks appear in front of your fox hole? what would you do... guns down hands up i expect.

I'd make a crap soldier.

[Lucarse]

Arrh exploit schmexploit, I had a real battle i lost to superior numbers (defended choke points got over run) i used the only tactic left to my disposal throw everything i had left at them 'workers'!.

Putting non trained troops or other non-coms into the battle front to delay a advance is a well used real life tactic, (Hitler Youth anyone) so hardly and exploit,

I put the workers in as a 2-3 tile thick shieldaround the city, soaked up the turns no distraction the AI or human player would have had to take the workers to get to my city.(ok maybe the human palyer would just bypass the city) anyway it worked, i stand by it Humpf!

[JohnM2433]

Originally posted by Lucarse
(ok maybe the human palyer would just bypass the city)

That's what makes it an "exploit": you're deliberately taking advantage of the AI's stupidity.

Retaking cities as jshelr described is also another type of exploit: taking advantage of the way the game works. In this case, part of Greece's treasury was essentially magically transported to the cities after they took them. Now, there's no real need for them to distribute money evenly throughout their empire, and it would be far more realistic for the city to build up its own cash reserve over time. But this is not how the game works.

AI cheats are an imprecise analog to human exploits. In each case, one player does something another cannot. The AI "cheats" when it gets to do something the game interface doesn't allow the human to do. If the AI simply pracitices better tactics than the human, however, I would not call that an exploit. The reason I regard this as fair is that I think of humans as being able to learn and change their strategies; in short, we are "free" to do whatever we choose.

Human exploits are different, because there is no clear boundry between the AI and the game itself, and thus no real distinction between stupidity and incapacity on the part of the AI. That is, there's no difference between the AI not being smart enough know what to do and simply lacking the ability to do it, because whenever the programmers design the AI to do something they give it both the knowledge and the capability required. If there is no function in the game which allows/causes the AI to imploy tactic X, does that mean the AI "can't" do X, or that it "doesn't know about it"? For the AI, there is no such distinction.

This raises some interesting thoughts in my mind. Suppose that there are some forms of reasoning so complex that the human brain is incabable of supporting them. In this case, there would be no clear distinction between stupidity (relatively speaking) and incapacity for the human, just is there is not for the AI. If a superintelligent computer were then to play a game against a human, it might then be considered an "exploit" for it to use such reasoning. After all, what is really important isn't that one player is a human and that the other is a computer, but that one is capable of doing something that the other is fundamentally incapable of doing, thus giving one of them an unfair advantage.

That got a little off topic, didn't it?

[Barchan]

Originally posted by Lucarse
nice one.... oh no marines holding sticks with nails in them...run away ........

Ah, The Simpsons. Is there anything out there we can't find an appropriate quote from the show apply to?

Originally posted by Lucarse
Maybe their should be a 'scare the crap out of them' or surrender feature?
30 tanks appear in front of your fox hole? what would you do... guns down hands up i expect.

I'd make a crap soldier.

For the United Kingdom? Yes, you would. For Iraq? Why, you'd be perfect!

[Galvatron]

Originally posted by Lucarse

Maybe their should be a 'scare the crap out of them' or surrender feature?
30 tanks appear in front of your fox hole? what would you do... guns down hands up i expect.

I'd make a crap soldier.

Well this is definitely also my idea. Why should you fight with a gun against tanks? No need to throw away your precious live and btw being captured by the enemy isn't that bad. You get food, accommodation and everything you need for free .

Ok back to topic. I think your strategy is great. Haven't really considered it yet but reading your post I think next time when I'm in trouble I will send my workers as shield.

[Lucarse]

Originally posted by Galvatron
Ok back to topic. I think your strategy is great. Haven't really considered it yet but reading your post I think next time when I'm in trouble I will send my workers as shield.

Thanks my man finally a little appreciation! :-)

This is not an Exploit,...basically if you surround something with something you have to penetrate something to get into something... clear :-)

Human or AI would have had to soak up their turns clearing the sheild to get to the city i bought me some time not much but enough.

What pissed me off is i had an MPP with rome, i hit anarachy and they were on me like rabid dogs. I think anything is justified if thats going to happen.

[jshelr]

BTW, I tend to agree that this was not an exploit for two reasons:

1. you don't think so and it's your game
2 as you explain it, you've given the AI no option to take the city but to lose a little time by going through your workers. makes sense....a reasonable sacrifice, especially late in the game when workers are of less value

[Bangedup]

This is not an exploit but a legitimate tactic used througout history. One case in point is Japan's assault on China in WW2. China's population greatly outnumbered Japan, but that turned out to work against them. Japan was so brutal that it spread fear in a populace and every city they approached the population fled in a terror. As a result the Chinese Army was unable to reinforce their cities because the roads were choked with civilians.
You know who Dracula is right? His namesake is Count Drakul (spelling). The Huns were attacking his country and he knew he could not stop them. He took thousands of his own people and murdered them and impaled them on stakes on the road approaching his cities. The Huns so terrified by what this man could do to his own people refused to attack and instead retreated. Dracula: Hero or Villain?
The end result here is that using civilians to thwart an attack or defense is nothing new and certainly is not an exploit.
IMHO it was good thinking on your part and I admit to doing it myself. There is nothing wrong with using strategy or cleverness to beat the AI. It is in our nature to do so. If you believe using strategy to beat the AI is beneath you then why play at all?

[Lucarse]

Bangedup, I think the blokes real name was 'Vlad the Impaler'

I think hundreds of bodys on stakes would put the sh*ts up me.

[Fitz]

Good strat (and quick thinking) there Lucarse. Definately not an exploit, but rather clever use of your resources. Although it does point out the possible need for free worker/settler capture on railroads/roads.

BTW, I had to reread your original post. I too thought you were talking about the worker distraction tactic at first. Your worker human shield sounds like a brilliant (if brutal ) adaption to the circumstances that saved your bacon.