What is abusive ?

[Lord_Bob]

-Putting Lycanthropes Amulets and Slave Collars on junk commanders just so they get killed and get picked up by mage commanders.

-Destroying your own castles and pillaging own provinces rather than let someone take it.

Are you actually comparing having a 450 gold, 1000 year old mage in a fantasy world strap a slave collar on his neck because "it seemed like a good idea at the time" with a military tactic that has been used repeatedly throughout earth's history?

Cursed items, good and bad, should have a 100% no pick up rate.

[Sombre]

K - "Heck, if you don't like Bogus's commands, you can just make a mod and change his unit so he doesn't have them. I could mod that in and I don't even program well."

Show me, because I have no idea how you'd do that.

[Ironhawk]

Some players consider any casting of Astral Nexus abusive.

Clams/hoarding behavior is sometimes considered abusive.

[llamabeast]

Well, now I know never to play in an MP game with K.

To my mind it is pretty obvious which mentioned "exploits" are just a bit of cunning which is valid in the context of the game (e.g. wishing away items at a crucial time - how is that an exploit?) and which are clearly just nasty abuse of imperfections in the code (e.g. the Mists of Deception exploit before it was fixed). I expect everyone will now disagree with me.

In any case, I find K's suggestion that the game is exactly as it was meant to be by the devs blatantly ridiculous. Also suggesting every possible exploit should be modded out is a bit silly to my mind. Apologies, K, for being rude. Clearly we just disagree on this point, which is fine - I'm not trying to be personally unpleasant.

I can see that there are many things which play within the rules as they were intended but can be annoying, e.g. clam hoarding or Utterdark. They're a case for house rules I think. If no house rules have been made, feel free to use them - they are part of the vanilla game.

To me perhaps the best measure of what is an exploit and what is reasonable is considering "Is this reasonable and realistic (in the context of the game)" - sort of a RP point of view. If you can imagine your tactics working in "real life" or rather "dominions life" - good! If it's blatantly taking advantage of flaws in the coding then it's just not a fun thing to do, and being as the whole point of the game is to have fun, don't do it.

[vfb]

llamabeast said:
Well, now I know never to play in an MP game with K.

I think you got the wrong impression from his post. He did not personally use any bug/abusive tactics in any of the games I've played in with him.

Hordes of screaming monkey demons/undead, yes . Bug abuse, no.

You're missing out if you don't play with him, he's one of the best opponents I've had.

[LoloMo]

My suggestion is that any "exploitative tactics" should be listed as banned EXPLICITLY before a game is started. A general "banned if it's a bug or exploit" will not do.

Everyone has a different perspective. We come from different cultures. Each of us are exposed to different fantasy/mythology sets. Each of us have read a unique set of books and have thus derived a different "set" of RP point of view.

While a very few set of actions can be generally agreed upon as exploits, there are many others that can go both ways.

In my games, I have only seen 2 that are generally regarded as exploits:

1. Stealing Bogus Scripts
2. Mist of Deceptions + Battlefield damage enchantment, then retreating. In this case, it was allowed that the mage can retreat as their very last order. (This I believe has more to do with enforcement. There is no way to tell if the AI retreated or the last script was to retreat)

[llamabeast]

I think you got the wrong impression from his post. He did not personally use any bug/abusive tactics in any of the games I've played in with him.

Hordes of screaming monkey demons/undead, yes . Bug abuse, no.

You're missing out if you don't play with him, he's one of the best opponents I've had.

Yes, I think you're probably right. Apologies K, for an uncharacteristically grumpy post on my part. I guess I'm tired. I didn't really agree with what you said, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't happily play with you.

[Lord_Bob]

clam hoarding

Now, I don't see that as "uber", it does become insane around turn 70+, but really, by turn 70 vast amounts of unreal things are in play. Are clams uber compared with Tartinians for example? If you have Alt-9 for the wish, what are the chances you have Conj-9 for the Tartinians?

[vfb]

Sombre said:
K - "Heck, if you don't like Bogus's commands, you can just make a mod and change his unit so he doesn't have them. I could mod that in and I don't even program well."

Show me, because I have no idea how you'd do that.

I tried to do it this way:

Code:

---

#selectmonster 647

#clear

#copystats 578

#copyspr 578

#descr "A witch turned Bogus and Co into Bog Beasts!"

#end

#selectmonster 648

... etc for the rest of the Company

#end

---

But I still ended up with a bunch of Bog Beasts with special commands, after charming them. Fadmargast the Bog Beast still wants to "Attack commanders" and Fang the Bog Beast would very much like to "Fire Magic Users".

Maybe the easiest way is to mod them to be mindless. I don't think Mindless units can be charmed. You could also crank up their MR.

Probably you could also mod them into underwater units, so they would insta-die when they appear without fish amulets.

[KissBlade]

I use every dirty trick in the book above and beyond. =P

You think regular archer decoying is bad .. whoo boy, don't play a game with me if I have two hours to script =).