Dark Knight

[Xietor]

It is cheating. There actually used to be an attack commander option, but it was overpowered and removed.

Cheating-or taking an unfair advantage of other players-is all the same. I would prefer that my files be hacked, rather than have someone use an exploit and kid themselves into thinking they were fighting fairly.

I guess in the end, what the goal should be in any competitive game is that the players all use the same rules.
It is common knowledge that you can copy the dark knight's orders. What I thought was equally well known was that it is an exploit in mp games.

remind me not to let some of you be the banker if we play monopoly!

[quantum_mechani]

It's a slippery slope, if using such orders is cheating, how about archer decoying? What about GoRing tartarians (a non-obvious tactic that I would argue is actually a more potent one than Bogus's orders)?

As such, I'd say it's a tactic like any other: people find blesses and other strategies to be unbalanced in some contexts, and so often explicitly deny or restrict them when setting out rules for a particular game. It is certainly valid to do the same here, but to say it is by default cheating is to enter a quagmire of fuzziness about what is actually cheating.

[Xietor]

Gor any unit is not cheating. There is a spell designed to allow this in games by the designers. Same with using a bless.

It is a far different animal to capture a unit that has a command that was SPECIFICALLY removed from the game as being overpowered, and using a scripting command put in by the designers for reduced micromanagement to put back into the game an overpowered feature just for your armies.

In any event, I have seen this exploit used against me in the big game. But I overcame it. It is surmountable-but it is cheating. If I see it in the Epic Heroes game that I am running-I will see it only once. Then that player will be set to AI.

I guess it is up for the host of the game to set what is and is not allowed. I am glad Llamabeast has clear rules on what is and is not permitted since he is hosting a ton of games on his server these days.

Hail to Llamabeast!

[Ironhawk]

Yeah, I agree with QM. Since you arent breaking any rules of the game - the order is, after all, built in - you can't technically frame it as "cheating".

Which is not to say that I support its use - I've never used it in MP and I'm not sure how I would feel if it were used againt me. But in Dominions, all nations have advantages which are not available to any enemy player in the game... yet we do not hear anyone complaining that, for example, only Pyth/Mari get access to angels or something. The only difference there being that you know the advantages/disadvantages of each nation as you go into any given game, whereas gaining attack commanders via bogus would be something that would randomly happen and you (as an opponent) might or might not know about it.

[Folket]

The question is whether this is a bug or not. Explotation of bug is cheating.

[Tuidjy]

I think that it is A-OK to use the order on Bogus and his companions. To copy
and paste the order on other units is using an unintended consequence - because
it is hard to believe that the developers wanted it that way. In all honesty,
while I have been doing the former ever since Dominions II, I have never done
the latter - as in, I was not smart enough to think of it... so maybe I am biased.

[sector24]

This is an interesting conversation. On a related note, Aezeal, you can save the reload the game in single player if you want to try your hand on Bogus and his allies. However, with all the subjective morality being tossed around I'm not sure I want to post how to do it.

[Ironhawk]

Folket said:
The question is whether this is a bug or not. Explotation of bug is cheating.

Well, its been around since the Dom2 days and the devs are aware of it... but still no changes to how it works in all that time.

So what does that mean?

[Sensori]

Ironhawk said:

Well, its been around since the Dom2 days and the devs are aware of it... but still no changes to how it works in all that time.

So what does that mean?

It means that it's a mechanic from the times of Dominions *1* that just hasn't been changed for one reason or another. Probably due to the priorization thing people have been talking about.

Personally, I think that abusing it is lame and completely out of the realm of D3. It's an ancient thing from the olden days when it was the norm which should've been removed ages ago, but hasn't been. This sort of reminds me of bugs (even exploits) for which people have been banned for that have been in Anarchy Online from nearly the start and are only now being fixed (after 6 years of the game being in existence). The major difference between Dominions and AO in this field however is that FunCom has a lot more people working on their game.

Yeah. It's a relic from a time when you could make limitless amounts of elemental kings and queens (sort of like Tartarians of those days, except you could make craploads of actually good freespawn stuff too), devils of all sorts, gem hoarding items were cheap, wishing for Doom Horrors and having armies of them was possible and when Arcane Nexus was truly awesome (those two were prolly in D2 still, though)... Ahh, those were the days.

/ramble

[Aezeal]

It's explotation of a but IMHO and in most games/settings/MPthingies that is not the same a cheating but it usually IS punished the same as cheating and frowned upon nearly as much.

Having said that I think one should not use it in MP games