[llamabeast]

MX has been banned.

We owe thanks to WraithLord who raised concerns about MX's extraordinary success in the game. To WraithLord's credit he did so with considerable trepidation and did not wish to make allegations, but just to reassure himself that all was well. I took a look at some of MX's turn files, and found that he had been cheating.

I won't say exactly how he'd been cheating, because that would be stupid, but suffice to say that his 2h files had been tampered with, and much of his success in this game (and probably in his other game, Fools) was a result of that tampering. I sent the files straight away to JK who confirmed that the files had been tampered with. He's already made a fix, so that from the next patch such cheating will no longer be possible.

Unlike Norfleet, the infamous cheater of Dom2, MX seems to have been very subtle, and it took me a while to find things which were definitely wrong, rather than just impressive for the turn number. We were lucky to catch him.

Although I've banned MX (with lch's and JK's approval), I will send him an e-mail to see if he has anything to say for himself. That seems only fair.

I'm sorry that your game will have been really rather fouled up by all this. Anyway, in a moment I will roll the game back to last turn, and replace MX's turn with an order to set T'ien Ch'i to AI. Then I'll force hosting and you can resume the game. Incidentally it could well have been some error in MX's tampering which caused the crash on last turn. I don't know.