MP: ThePantokratorNeedsAWife - Intermediate CBM1.94 - Submit Pretenders

[Man with No Name]

Originally Posted by bbz

Personally I think its quite silly to require of someone to remove an assassin from what he should be doing(a.k.a assassinate) just because somehow he picked up a soul contract)

I would say it is unfortunate rather than silly. As in it is unfortunate that you are forced to change your plans because something unwanted and out of your control happened. But that is the reality of a situation like this. It does not matter if the original plan of the player (when buying the merc at the sieged fort) was to leave it behind to assassinate when the army moved away. The realities of the situation, and the changed nature of the Terminus unit (due to the unwanted Soul Contract), meant that the player had to change their plans, or directly cause an exploit if they didn't. (although it would certainly have helped to tell the affected player how to break the fort-lockdown. But I'll come onto that later)

You can say it is silly that a single Scout unit can block an entire army. And it is silly. But silly or not that is what can happen unfortunately, and players need to accept the responsibility for not exploiting the flaws in the game engine. As if the players themselves do not accept the responsibility, then who will? Because someone has to or MP games could become highly disrupted by players using exploits (if it were not the players responsibilty to make sure they don't use them)

Originally Posted by bbz

So to save yourself some more arguing, next time you are about to use a scout unit with a soul contract tell the person you are using it against how to counter the unwanted effects from it - a.k.a the patrtol/break siege thingy.
this way you can be happy killing off his commanders and he can be happy that he is not locked by a supposed exploit.

I think it would be difficult to get players to agree to that solution. As in many cases it would mean you would be telling your opponent your exact plans.

As in this example the Ulm player would have needed to be told that the sieging army was moving away (very useful info to know), and that there was going to be an assassin with a Soul Contract left behind.(always useful to know if there are hostile assassins in your provinces). I think a lot of players would be reluctant to give away such important strategic info to their opponent. But maybe I am wrong here and players will freely tell their plans to their opponent in advance, and the location of their assassin units. That is unrealistic I would say.


The only real solution is for players to be made aware of this exploit, what causes it, and then have the onus of responsibility placed on the players themselves to make sure they do not intentionally engineer situations where this exploit is almost certain to occur. Which is what happneed here, as the orders issued were unlikely to result in any other outcome, and I don't see how any other outcome could have been expected given the actions undertaken (those actions being moving the sieging army away, and leaving the Soul Contract assassin behind). Not unless the Ulm player did not ever attempt to break a token siege. Which sounds like it wasn't the case as the sieging army moved away, I guess because it feared a significant break siege attempt.

This exploit can be directly compared to move-blocking. As there the onus is on the player not to intentionally move-block other players, and I see no reason why this exploit does not fall into the same catagory, and so dealt with in the same manner. As both are based on a flaw in the game engine that allows a player to interfere with another players actions in a non-meaningful engagement, and at insignificant risk and cost. The only real difference is that with the fort-lockdown there is another exploit that can be used to counter it, which is not the case with move-blocking. (although that only applies if there is more than one commander unit in the sieged fort. As one has to break siege, and the other ordered to patrol. If there is only one commander, then AFAIK the siege can not be broken)