What is abusive ?

[Lord_Bob]

Really, archer decoys aren't even beginning to exploit the combat "AI". There are some many, much worse, things that can be done, that archer decoys, well know, really aren't that bad.

For example:
Send in a few fliers and every unit guarding your archers comes unglued and rushes the fliers. Especially if they are "mounted fliers" so even "Attack Calvary" or "Fire Calvary" will have all your guys shooting your own archers, or fleeing their positions.

There are many others, the experienced players just don't want to give up their tricks. So like me, you are just going to "get to experience" these problems.

[Sombre]

You can use light infantry without resorting to archer decoy tactics. Just put them behind your shielded infantry units. I have no problem with people placing units around, I just think it's retarded when they're putting 'groups' of 1,2 or 3 random dudes scattered around. I know I won't do it and if they want to that's their bag, I can't be bothered to micro against stuff like that so they'll probably have an advantage. Yay for them. I hope my opponents don't do things like that, but I can't blame them for doing it. It won't work for [censored] against someone equally willing to micro though.

[Morkilus]

The archer decoy, um, "exploit" was a much worse problem in Dom2, which had a different morale and targeting system. I don't see a problem with any of the issues Twan brought up. People use decoys, cannon fodder, and feint attacks in real war all the time. And Lord_Bob, I'd much rather have my infantry taking out fliers that are harassing my archers than let the archers deal with it with their daggers. Fliers have a hard enough time already in tactical combat; don't take away their best use.

Taking advantage of a real bug is not cool in my opinion, however.

[Meglobob]

Evilhomer said:5) Using combinations of "mists of deception" + some battle enchantment damageing spell (like wratful skies) and then retreating the caster mage. Basically there is no way to kill the mist, so the enemy army has to endure 50 rounds of mass lightning bolts....pure evil in my opinion.

Is this still a problem under 3.10?

I cast darkness and my mages morale broke, so he legged it, the darkness ended straight away, as soon as he left the battlefield.

So if you retreat the casting mage under 3.10, the battlefield spell ends. Problem solved?

[K]

If the game allows it, its not abusive; otherwise the Devs would code it out.

[Tichy]

That confuses intention with execution.

At the very least, exploiting acknowledged but not yet squished bugs must be considered abusive.

At a second level, exploiting things like the Bogus copy command should be considered abusive because it is an undesired side effect to a desired feature that may just be too cumbersome to track down and rewrite. (Unless of course we hear from the devs that charming Bogus is supposed to net you a combat trainer who introduces new secret strategies in addition to his own bad self...)

[thejeff]

It also ignores bugs they haven't been able to track down.

And any house rules for a particular game should be honored, even if the game doesn't/can't enforce them.
I think the default, if informal, house rule for games on this forum includes "don't exploit bugs on the bug list"

There are also metagame abuse issues that can't be addressed by the mechanics. Host setting up a map to favor himself. Secret pre-game deals. Playing 2 position in a game. etc, etc.

[Torin]

amen

[Baalz]

Well, any discussion of abusive behavior must consider not just the very nebulous definition of "unintended" (unintended by who? The devs aren't an infalable authority, they're just some smart guys who threw together a bunch of stuff they thought would be cool. House rules, mods, etc. come up because ultimately it's the players in the game who should decide what type of game they want to play) but also its impact on the game. For example I consider grabbing the Bogus scripts to be no different than, say, capturing a unique artifact from a powerful indie commander. Its hard to do, requires luck, and is not generally overpowering. It's not exactly a secret at this point, but in theory this is something you need to be a bit clever to leverage and just adds one more interesting facet to the game. As I've posted elsewhere, the whole point of strategy is to use cleverness to make sure you're *not* in a fair fight so it's a bit ridiculous to complain that somebody used a tactic that wasn't fair. That being said, you have to also acknowledge that we're all just playing this game for fun so doing stuff that just breaks the game or is only effective because it annoys your opponent to death is a dickish thing to do regardless of what the explicitly stated house rules are.

[Tichy]

I was objecting to the claim in an earlier post, "It's there, therefore the dev's intended it." That seems transparently false, given the obvious possibilities of difficult to trace bugs and unexpected behaviors.

This leaves open the grey areas, instead of stamping them out, which is what I think you're saying as well.