Trading commanders, exploit or not?

[Jarkko]

Originally Posted by Micah

Stealth raiding on an opponent's lands IS supported though. Likewise, mages in the back can sometimes be massacred by flying or fast cavalry units.

But aren't you basically claiming such attacks too should be considered exploits? If I send a sneaky army to attack your mages, but you wipe them out while burning your gems, you would cry foul game?

I don't think you want to claim any attack which fails but that burned your gems to be exploits, do you? If you don't, then where is the line? Who decides which attack are legitimate and which ones are not? I've seen Ghost Riders wipe massive armies (mostly because the opponent mages nuked their own troops which resulted in a rout), but should using Ghost Riders be always considered foul play if they do not wipe the army? What guerrilla attacks would be legitimate, should all remote spells that target an army be exploits?

Is using assassins an exploit? How many times have I, and I bet you too, used assassins from inside a besieged fort to attempt assassination as the last desperate move; but if the target is a mage and has scripted spells that burn gems, wouldn't that too be an exploit?

What about fires from afar or seeking arrow spam, they can kill many mages with lots of gems, isn't that an exploit too?


I am sorry, but I do not agree with your view.

[vfb]

Originally Posted by Jarkko

I fail to see the problem of sending in chaff armies to slow down hostile armies.

It's unrealistic to completely prevent forward movement of an entire huge army for possibly several consecutive months, by attacking it with some trivial force that immediately retreats. I can't think of how the developers could have implemented this differently. But it's still a lame tactic.

If you scripted commanders to burn hundreds of gems, then maybe the scripting wasn't that well thought out? I mean, it is not like only your opponent can do the Ghost riders attack, or? Do unto thy opponent what they do to you.

The game mechanics do not allow you to script for several different situations. The game mechanics do not allow you to limit the number of gems a mage can use from his supply, per battle. It's unrealistic that a mage in the backfield would really burn all his gems summoning up fire elementals in an easily winnable fight.

Edit: About Assassins: yeah, assassination targets can do some dumb stuff too. But I can write this off as caused by their surprise when attacked by the assassin. Does not break my suspension of disbelief.

[Zeldor]

Micah was really clear, I think. Sending attacks that have no chance of doing any harm. It's really obvious.

When you are about to storm any fort, he can just cast some remote-attack spells, so your mages execute the script meant for storming. And there is nothing you can do about it. And you can't do the same to your enemy, as he is in the fort. Good luck winning without BEs or buffs.

Sure, it's sometimes hard to decide when you want to really weaken someone before storming and when you want to burn his gems. But many situations are obvious. You don't send GRs to kill few chaff units. You don't send one weakly equipped thug to attack 30+ mages, without even scripting it.

[Micah]

Jarkko, are you deliberately being obtuse? Flanking attacks can be stopped by putting troops on your flanks. Fliers can be stopped with storm or putting decoys behind your squishy mage types so the attack rear hits them instead.

I admit that enforcement of a rule like this would be problematic, but I don't think it's a bad thing to put in an expectation that it not be done, at least as a potential house rule. If someone feels the need to cheat and do it anyhow, well good for them.

Additionally, as with many of the issues I've been bringing up of late the borderline cases do not break the game. If someone sneaks in 5 reanimating priests with LAD it's not a problem, but when they have 100 of them the game breaks. People continuously bring up borderline cases and point to them with a great deal of hand-wringing about unfairly persecuting people. I'm not advocating for anything of the sort, just house rules against clear cut abuse of the AI. The truly abusive cases will be visible as such, the borderline cases don't provide enough of an advantage to cause a major problem.

Assassins and remote spells both fall back into the obtuse camp, since those are clearly some of the intended uses for them, and they are, again, counterable with bodyguards or resistance items. (Though I REALLY wish the assassin AI script was better.)

I wouldn't agree with my view the way you're interpreting and presenting it either, so I guess there's not much of a problem.

[Squirrelloid]

You know, strangely enough, assassins *are* the counter to armies which intercept and then retreat, blocking your army movement. Since his commanders are scripted to retreat, they auto-die to assassins. So you can 'protect your wagons', or whatever analogy we're trying to make. The counter doesn't really fit the above metaphor, but it is a counter...

Is it an exploit to drop a remote attack spell on a fortress with sufficiently low PD that the remote attack spell will win, thus stopping any armies inside from moving?

[Jarkko]

Ok, so my previous examples were not exploits. So who is the judge of what is obvious exploiting (as that seems to be agreed term, "obvious exploit") and what is not? Is the first suicide attack an obvious exploit, or the third, or fourth attack?

Is the usual Pan harassing tactics of Summon Lammashtas Retreat an exploit? Is it an exploit if 10 Pans does it? Is it an exploit only if done against a besieging army? If Lammashtas are not an exploit, then why is Ghost Riders an exploit (they are effectively the same thing, send in suicide troops to cause maximum carnage).

[Micah]

Again, I'm not concerned with policing this stuff, if someone decides to cheat and violate house rules they can go ahead, it's not any better than busting out a file editor. Cheating is cheating, and I'd hope the community would be mature enough to not do it, at least the players that are good enough to really abuse such exploits, or play well enough in a larger context for abuse to win a game for them.

I still think "don't abuse the AI by casting spells to bleed gems without any chance at actually hurting the army you're attacking" is a good house rule, even if it's hard to prove. I'd like to play with people that can be taken at their word, is that so much to ask?

[Dimaz]

Micah, I agree with you, but the point is that it has to be explicitly specified in game house rules, because otherwise it gives unfair advantage to players who exploit these tricks. So even if I dislike gem burning very much, when I see that someone in a game where I play goes that way, I will certainly use it myself (if house rules say nothing about it). However, as it's really sometimes tough to say if it was abusing or not, such rules may become too strict. So I see no good solution here.

[Jarkko]

@Micah: No, it is not too much to ask.

But as people, maybe even some good players, see things differently, and you apparently have no desire to define *what* exactly you consider cheating, then it might be very difficult for others to know. To me it seems you are on a crusade against perfectly valid and reasonable tactics which work exactly as designed, and I find it very hard "the mature community" would accept those ideas without some blinking of eyes. Snarl as much as you want along your nose about cheaters, but it is a guarantee everybody won't be thinking similarily to you about some unwritten and undefined code.

And yet, if you have such good players who think as you do, then more power to you! I for one am not very good at this game, and I intend to use sneakers and remote summons in the future too, even if some good players would go pale of the thought. There are after all already games where the diplomatic agreements are binding (which I consider weird), and there are no-diplomacy games too (and they are even more weird to me) out there, so one more sneaker-and-remote-summons-are-cheating group (whome I would consider weird ) won't topple the "mature community", or so I hope at the very least

[Micah]

@Jarkko - "you are on a crusade against perfectly valid and reasonable tactics which work exactly as designed" Please provide me a dev quote on that. Until then I'm calling BS on you attributing the ****ty AI gem use to intended design.

You also say you're not a very good player, and yet you insist on knowing which tactics are "reasonable" without a solid grasp on late game play at high levels of competition. Yes, I'm an elitist jerk, thanks for asking. =)

What I consider cheating is breaking the house rules that are set up in a game. I'm currently arguing in favor of certain rules being adopted on a widespread basis because they make for a better game, in my not at all humble opinion. Again, the hand-wringing comes out in force in your response. I'm not saying people that use these tactics in current games are dirty cheaters, I'm saying that *going forward* the game is better off if they are removed via house rule. No need to refer to an unwritten and undefined code, just a simple post by the admin. The whole point of this thread was to start a discussion so house rules can be made more explicit and easy to implement, since the current system of just leaving it unspecified has led to some nasty situations.

Maybe I didn't make it clear enough that I wasn't trying to accuse anyone of cheating for stuff that's in a gray area or undefined in a game. Of course people will be angling for whatever advantages they can find if they're playing competitively, and I do it myself. I'm not trying to insult anyone for playing as hard as they can, but I do think I'm in a good position to point out what feels to me like flaws in the game engine, since I've got a pretty good understanding of the game, and a lot of play experience in terms of what makes for a good game.

Just for a guideline, here are some rough guidelines in terms of what feels legitimate to me vs what feels like an exploit/tactic that is detrimental to the enjoyment of the game:
I feel like tactics that interfere with other players' units and orders without actually interacting meaningfully with them (retreating vs fighting a battle, or dying to artillery without doing a single point of damage to bleed gems) are problematic.
Tactics which break the economy (by getting something for nearly nothing or getting something which will pay for itself before long) in an open-ended fashion are problematic.

Hm, that covers most of it actually. Breaking other people's units without actually fighting them, and breaking the economy. Might be something else I'm forgetting, but those are the big ones. There is some rhyme and reason to my crusade.