What is abusive ?

[Twan]

Just to know what is the general opinion about these exploitive (or at least gamey) tactics...

Personnally as rules against any of these things aren't really enforceable I consider all the following valid behaviors, and will occasionally use some in MP as most players do. But I guess some players consider some of these things as pure treachery...

- using archer decoys (groups of one or two expandable units in front of the army) to pull the arrows of the first squads in "fire:closest" --> I think there are three good limitations to this, 1/ you need to sacrify troops and if the ennemy don't use archers or use them with intelligence, the sacrifice is for nothing, 2/ the ennemy may avoid decoys, using fire:none (not 100% efficient but usually targets a big squad), or fire:archers, fire:cavalry, etc..., 3/ for big battles you'll need lots of commanders squad slots as one decoy isn't sufficient (especially if the ennemy use several little archers groups) - so against experimented players (who usually use themselves decoys and many little archers groups) I think it can't give an unfair advantage (but countering this tactic force players to do more micro-gestion in MP, so decoys are harmful for the general game experience)

- using diversion magic attacks to waste ennemy gems (ie : some call of the winds/wild on a province you are going to attack) ; it may work or not as the tactical AI is programmed not to use gems if the fight is too easy (but the AI seems to weight more the number of units than the quality) ; also if the ennemy hasn't scripted gems spells it's you wasting your gems ; so another exploitive but not really game breaking tactic in most cases ; but it may be ultra powerful if it allow you to win against an ennemy main army using powerful battle enchants, so it's maybe the worst AI weaknesses exploitation tactic when it works

- using 2 items of the same kind on an unit with 3 misc slots... as 2 similar items don't work in adjacent slots it was originally an exploit of some missing lines in the code, but my impression is : 3 slots pretenders and heroes were made with a possible use of this exploit in mind (or it would have been fixed since dom2, instead of adding more 3 slots pretenders in dom3)

There are probably far more borderline things, I just remind these 3 for having seen them used (or used them myself I'm not an angel) in MP games.