Dark Knight

[Edratman]

quantum_mechani said:
Very simple, take 1-2 units, put them in a group by themselves, in the very front and center. Put the rest of your stuff slightly behind and to the sides. Enemy archers will target the decoys until the decoys die or go out of range.

What a brilliant idea! I can see how it works. Not a cheat by any means, but definately an exploit. I can't believe I have not even seen it mentioned in the 9 months I've been following this forum.

[Ironhawk]

Edratman said:
What a brilliant idea! I can see how it works. Not a cheat by any means, but definately an exploit. I can't believe I have not even seen it mentioned in the 9 months I've been following this forum.

Heh. Thats because the tactic is SO COMMON in mp play as to not require mentioning What surprises me is that you havent seen someone use it against you.

[Shovah32]

Edratman said:

What a brilliant idea! I can see how it works. Not a cheat by any means, but definately an exploit. I can't believe I have not even seen it mentioned in the 9 months I've been following this forum.

It probably wasn't mentioned because (atleast for me) it was considered common knowledge - although I could be wrong.

[Xietor]

I do not think using exploits is common in mp games. In my 40 or so mp games, I have had the attack commander exploit used against me 1 time.

Some people on this forum remind me of players in WOW and EQ that exploited bugs to level their characters, then when caught, cried because their characters were deleted. Many of these players argued that they did not consider "whatever" to be an exploit. Those arguments fell on deaf ears.

Just because a bug exists within the programing of a game does not make it "right" to exploit it.

In any event I am glad the matter is resolved.

[quantum_mechani]

As nice as it is to be able to see things in black and white, the world, and even the dominions world, is a messy place. Even assuming the issue is 'resolved' (i.e., all future use of the tactic that has not been explicitly allowed is considered cheating), that doesn't really answer the question of what qualifies as an unacceptable exploit, and moves the line to much fuzzier place.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

I thought the archer decoy was common knowledge as well.
It's one reason to break your archers into squads- you shouldn't always fire closest. The targeting of 'fire none' can be handy.

I sometimes put some tough units in the rear, instead of my mages, so attack rear commands don't quite go as planned. I often have to deal with short range spells, so sometimes I even have my mages in the frontline, with a small bodyguard. Not often, but sometimes.

[Xietor]

The answer QM, to your question is this: if you think what you are planning to do is questionable, post on the game thread and ask the other players if it is acceptable.

In Alpaca, Valerius captured the Dark Knight, and posted
the question as to whether it would be proper to copy the commands and use them on other commanders. The other players informed him it was an exploit-and he should refrain from doing it. But he was thanked by everyone for his honesty.

If in doubt-ask.

[quantum_mechani]

That is not a very satisfactory definition. First of all, it doesn't really measure what is most exploitive, only what people are most accustomed too. For instance, people are very unlikely to outlaw archer decoying, not due to any particular judgement about it's abusiveness, but simply because people are so accustomed to using it. Further, even if it was decided exploitive, it would be almost unenforceable since it's impossible to say if that smallish group of units near the front is actually a decoy.

On top of that, it assumes a basic intuition of what would be considered an exploit, which implies another definition.

[Edratman]

The archer decoy is common knowledge to MP players. Alas and alack, I am solely a SP.

[llamabeast]

As an aside, does anyone know where the word "mob" comes from?

(I believe it's used in e.g. WoW to mean 'enemy', and there doesn't have to be a group of them as in the normal sense of a mob).