diplomatic exchange of planets

Hmm. Interesting.

That's a tricky issue becuase you have to ask yourself, how much do you wnat to cripple other parts of diplomacy to prevent any possible cheese tactic? It is, afterall, a single player game.

Perhaps the AI could be coded to detect this tactic and, on the second or third try, respond with something like "Oh no you don't!! I'm on to you now! Give my planets back or it will be war!!!!"

Certainly it could be programmed to detect this. The issue then comes, which useful AI feature should we drop? I.e. if we're plugging self-inflicted wounds in the game we're not adding something else.

For instance, I would like to add AI features where it is better at detecting star base aggression.

Fixing cheese in diplomacy and AI star base monitoring will take roughly the same time. Which one should be pursued?

I think which ever is picked for 1.0 the other should go into 1.1. The star base aggerssion issue looks like the more serious one, so I think it should be done first. And there will always be new cheesy tactics discovered, which is why your plans for 1.x are so nice.

go for the a.i. features. I've known about other cheese tactics and i prefer not to use them, I wish to win or die on my own accord And other tactics (like knowing where all the other a.i.'s are located in a gigantic galaxy before turn 5) will surface as more and more players try different things.
rich

Here's an example of something that was in the OS/2 version that players were aware of. They could use it or not, it was, afterall, a single player game:

The pathfinding in the OS/2 version (back in 1993) was understandably very primitive.

If a ship was blocked in front it would try to go left, if that failed it would try to go right and if that failed it would just sit there.

So some people would just crank out 3 scouts and block alien colony ships by doing this. While they did this, they demanded we "fix" this "bug".

The problem was, to "fix" it would have required putting in an advanced path finding algorithm (i.e. what we have in today's GalCiv but back in 1993). If we had done that the performance of the game would have significantly suffered.

Any time you put in any feature that's unnecessary there's a trade off. It has to come from somewher else. I know of many cheese tactics in GalCiv (the new one) that are quite devastating. But addressing them would require an immense effort and far more calculations by the AI which woudl slow the game down for everyone.

I know of some really devastating diplomacy cheese tactics that the only way to address them would require wimping out all sorts of parts of the diplomacy screen. And in fact, addressing the one that's mentioned here would basically just mean the AI won't trade planets anymore or make it much more difficult to do so.

It sure would! I remember running the game on a 386-40 with 8mhz of RAM. I never did find that particular tactic, though!

Swapping planets is cheese full stop, do you really believe that a goverment would stay in power if you gave 1 billion earthling's to the dregin.

An easier way to stop this tactic would be to simply refuse any trade that includes planets on both side of the trade. Then trading planets for other items could still be allowed.

Lucky_Jack

There are other cheese tactics that are far worse that that one. I can wipe out an a.i. in 1 turn. That's Rotten Cheese. But Brad's got a real valid point. Why waste all their efforts on cheese when it could be on giving us more variety. Some people will always try to cheat to get ahead. Wasn't that a major problem in the multiplayer games. It sure was in the ones i was in. So be honorable and don't become a cheese head (apologies to Green Bay for that one)

I was thinking, (a rarer and rarer occurence these days ) what if you left the cheese in but could find a way to easily flag the fact that it happened so it would flag to the metaverse, or it would reduce your total score when submitting to the universe (cheese found! you lose 1,000,000 points... some of the games might have a negative score LOL )

I say forget about fixing the cheese, at least for the moment. Adding detection of aggressive starbase expansion is much more important. If people want to exploit cheese, then let them. Sure, the metaverse will eventually need to be balanced to block this, but in general it only affects the player.

Paul.

I am not really all that concerned about the cheese, but some people are, and I find some of the suggestions for preventing them excessive. So. just in case the people at Stardock should actually consider one of the more onerous suggestions I try to come up with alternative suggestions.

I may have a suggestion, but I am very little awared of technical limits:

It should depend on
1- the value given to the exchanged thing (here = planet)
2- a certain limit to be diplomatically bad based on intelligence
3- the less planet they would have, the more value it would havr to them

So as in reality, there would be a limit to be diplomatically screwed up. The worst I am awared ofin reality is Russia, when satellites were going away on their own way, said "We will let you the boats and military stuff on your territory at midnight" and just took back all the valuable stuff at 23h30... BUT THERE WERE CONSEQUENCES. Arab states' confiance toward Russia was pretty diminished... The state Russia made this crappy trick to is on of the southern arab territories boarding the Black Sea. And they were hated for this and there was a diplomatical back slash, people also beeing alot more cautious in the future (stil now I'm sure).

Could someone define "cheese tactics" please. :notsure:

Cheese tactics = Tactics which takes advantage of a flaw in the AI's behaviour (or loophole in the code / design) gaining a noticeable advantage which no human opponent would ever let you exploit.

Or in some games, cheese behaviour is using a known overpowering tactic against which there is little or no defense due to a game design flaw / oversight.

Paul.
Paul.

Then of course, some cheese is a matter of perspective. But really, some of the "cheese" I have seen describe sound like real live bugs, such as being able to increase your demand to change an unacceptable trade to an acceptable one.