[Baalz]

I think trying to "ban" "exploits" is generally an exercise in frustration and futility. With all due respect, what does it matter what the devs intended? We're not playing the game they intended, we're playing the game they made. The devs are not some infallible source of inspired wisdom, and I happen to like the many, many non-obvious tricks you can pull by leveraging combinations of things that in all probability didn't occur to the original designers. QM has laid out several good examples, but heck trying to define what is "good and clever strategies" and "exploiting unintended consequences" is absolutely inane - there is so much complexity to this game that I'd guess *most* of the more subtle interactions were not explicitly intended - they threw in every cool thing they could think of, then removed/tweaked stuff for balance. Voila, out comes a phenomenally complex and nuanced game that a bunch of hardcore strategy nerds can play for years and years *because* there are so many neat little tricks you can pull out of the millions of ways you can combine things.

I can see banning the mists of deception exploit not because it's unintended but because its game breaking. This Bogus thing is not even close. I'll also try to:

ritual of rebirth the genie
cast vengeance of the dead on SCs until they auto rout
deploy every kind of decoy I can to fool the targeting AI
leverage every forge bonus I can wrangle to forge gem producing items
teleport a thug in prior to a big battle to try and make the enemy expend their gems before the main event
set my raiders to hide rather than attack so that the stealth is resolved before any magic retaliation
use fear to get enemies to route from an assassination
slap boots of quickness on every banner of the damned I ever forge
Fire and flee with death blessed archers
use the fact that globals (AC, AN, etc) take effect one turn before anyone can react
double/triple bless rush
use diplomacy and trade to my advantage -leverage my allies to help with things like harvesting gems from the sickle, pool gems for globals, gang up on weaker nations, etc.
order my communions so that the slaves can cast spells and give them banners of the damned

I do that not because I'm a prick who will do anything to win, but because that's the game I'm playing. The whole point of this game is to find clever tricks (read strategies). If something breaks the game experience by being too exploitive, I expect the devs to fix that (and they do a great job), but pretty much if it's in the game its fair play.