Being fire immune, I might as well post an opinion here.
I'm the one who has compiled the monster known as the bug shortlist and I have a fairly good idea of how many of these things behave and also what their impact on a game is.
In my opinion, there are three bugs that qualify as exploits that should be banned. Retaliation against a player using them could be considered, depending on how major it is.
The following bugs are, in my personal opinion, such exploits:
- SPELL Mists of Deception Keeps on producing phantasmal units even when all enemies are dead, causing combat to go on forever and autokilling all attacking units left on the battlefield
- SPELL Twiceborn: Grants immortality to demons with death magic. A demon with twiceborn in effect will respawn in capital like an immortal if it dies in friendly dominion.
- BHV Army Movement: Move & Patrol When a commander is selected to move into a province with a castle and the move order changed to move and patrol, adding units to his squads will not change the move order even if the units do not have sufficient map move. Thus units with strategic move of 0 can be moved from province to province and units with strategic move of 1 can be made to move farther than they should.
Out of these, the last one is situation dependent and the advantage gained may be major or minor as determined by other factors. It can also only be used if the commander and his fast troops are not slowed down by terrain, though I have no idea if the slow troops' lack of survival would ever be factored in wrt mountains or forests. It is non-trivial, but not as over the top as MoD.
The Twiceborn on demons problem is more of a hassle, but is mainly applicable to Lanka, which is generally tough enough to not even need it. Yomi can also exploit it, but given the Oni spirit forms, it may or may not work. I sure as hell would be pissed off if some thug commander just kept coming back after being killed several times even when he shouldn't have.
The Mists of Deception bug is such that if I were to run games, any player caught using the MoD/Damage BF Ench combo exploit in them would get turned instantly to AI, no mercy, no appeal and no exceptions.
Everything else in the buglist is a merely an annoyance compared to these three and can easily be worked around.