End Game Slaughter Moves

[Edi]

Being fire immune, I might as well post an opinion here.

I'm the one who has compiled the monster known as the bug shortlist and I have a fairly good idea of how many of these things behave and also what their impact on a game is.

In my opinion, there are three bugs that qualify as exploits that should be banned. Retaliation against a player using them could be considered, depending on how major it is.

The following bugs are, in my personal opinion, such exploits:

• SPELL Mists of Deception Keeps on producing phantasmal units even when all enemies are dead, causing combat to go on forever and autokilling all attacking units left on the battlefield
• SPELL Twiceborn: Grants immortality to demons with death magic. A demon with twiceborn in effect will respawn in capital like an immortal if it dies in friendly dominion.
• BHV Army Movement: Move & Patrol When a commander is selected to move into a province with a castle and the move order changed to move and patrol, adding units to his squads will not change the move order even if the units do not have sufficient map move. Thus units with strategic move of 0 can be moved from province to province and units with strategic move of 1 can be made to move farther than they should.

Out of these, the last one is situation dependent and the advantage gained may be major or minor as determined by other factors. It can also only be used if the commander and his fast troops are not slowed down by terrain, though I have no idea if the slow troops' lack of survival would ever be factored in wrt mountains or forests. It is non-trivial, but not as over the top as MoD.

The Twiceborn on demons problem is more of a hassle, but is mainly applicable to Lanka, which is generally tough enough to not even need it. Yomi can also exploit it, but given the Oni spirit forms, it may or may not work. I sure as hell would be pissed off if some thug commander just kept coming back after being killed several times even when he shouldn't have.

The Mists of Deception bug is such that if I were to run games, any player caught using the MoD/Damage BF Ench combo exploit in them would get turned instantly to AI, no mercy, no appeal and no exceptions.

Everything else in the buglist is a merely an annoyance compared to these three and can easily be worked around.

[Tuidjy]

What about casting Solar Brilliance on people reading your post?

[Baalz]

rotfl

[CUnknown]

The best compromise would be to annoy the host of whatever game you're playing until they state before the game starts that these things are banned. That way, everyone is clear on what is and is not allowed.

All hosts who think these things are illegal should say so ahead of time, because apparently not everyone agrees (although it is mind-boggling that they don't).

[lch]

CUnknown said:
All hosts who think these things are illegal should say so ahead of time, because apparently not everyone agrees (although it is mind-boggling that they don't).

I, as a host, would leave it up to the players to decide what's fair use and what isn't. Which should more or less coincide with the general consensus. Pure democracy...

[thejeff]

As long as it's spelled out ahead of time.

Anything else leads to assumption clash and ruined games.

[Tuidjy]

> Well, JK says that Domes of the same type don't add up(the 80% is checked until
> it drops, then the next 80%, etc),

Air domes stack. Check it yourself. It took me 13 turns of casting 10 seeker
arrows per turn to crack 3 stacked air domes. You have to break all of them
at once, or they do not break. If Tangra, Athena and Jesus came together to tell
me otherwise, I would show them my test game, and politely ask them to
help Illwinter debug the check mechanism if it is not working as designed.

> But, if you need someone to hold your hand, here is a foolproof way to beat
> the situation described above. [Mediocre plan full of unwarranted assumptions]

Why on earth would anyone have mages scripted to retreat/return patrolling his
home province?! And why do you think that MoD is the only tactic that he knows.
Why on earth would his enemy have free run of the lands around it? Do you
realize that your plan assumes that you have total and utter superiority, i.e.
the war is already won?

And have you never heard that back in Dominions II, when mages would follow the
script and burn gems even against a ghost ride, players had already devised
systems in which enchantments combos would be performed by different mages, in as
many as three battles per turn? No mage will recast an active enchantment.

[Edi]

Whoops, sorry about that. Screwed up the color tags and then had to deal with a customer before I could go back and edit it.

[DonCorazon]

Wow that is some nice customer service in Finland.

[Edi]

Happens when you work the late evening shift. Have to answer the phone. I'm off to home now.