[Taqwus]

If he modified gem inventories to do stuff with it, then the game presumably isn't too fanatical about checking this, or the server itself was somehow compromised or worked-around.


It occurs to me that their shouldn't be that much looping. That is --

Gems left in the treasury were computed from the previous turn.

Gem income from sites, gifts, events and enchantments was computed from the previous turn.

Outside of diplomatic means (handled by the messaging system) there is no in-game way to turn anything that's not a gem into a gem, or for 1 gem to turn into more than 1 within a turn. Within a turn but before processing, then, total gems should be strictly nonincreasing. It also should not matter at what point gem alchemy was done, because you can't get more in-turn except by alchemy and because the ratio is fixed. That is, if alchemy was done at any point in the turn, it must have been legal with identical results and with the gems available at the beginning of the turn.
Then there aren't that many numbers to juggle (six types of gems turning into pearls, pearls turning into six types of gems, fire and earth gems turning into money -- which can be done after all other alchemy checks because that's a one-way street and can't make other alchemy operations possible if they weren't already).

Forging has a bit of bookkeeping; the game would need to check that the number of forges done using hammers does not exceed the number of hammers available from the end of the previous turn, and that the forgers had the necessary item slots in addition to skills.

Then, once alchemy is completed, gold becomes a one-way-street; you can get gold from alchemy, but you can't easily turn anything else (people, buildings, units) into gold that you can use that very same turn. You can pillage or hike tax rates, but you don't see the gold until next turn, so it'd be illegal to spend it or put it in the treasury until the appropriate time in turn computation.

Exception: You can get a refund of gold by clearing a recruitment queue that was non-empty after the previous turn. Whether or not you can clear a queue, however, is not affected by other in-turn actions, and the maximum you can get should be based on the Last turn since even if you increase the refund by adding units you have an equally large debit incurred during the addition.

And so forth. I don't think there's much room for bizarre circular operations (actually profitable alchemy, say; e.g. a _MoM_ player with Alchemy, Runemaster and obscene casting skill forging and breaking small items during a turn for pure profit) or anything else that would be unusually difficult to serialize.