Cheating, bug or good strategy?

[fightingflattops]

I am playing as France (second game with this strategy, similar development).
First time after two risky war draws with UK and Germany in the first years, I found a new strategy.

I create war tensions with Italy (sometimes AH), then I keep the war going (the longest possible even when I am clearly winning) to raise the budget.
I make peace when the tensions are getting too high with UK or Germany. Peace reduce tensions with everyone.
The increased budget help my ship construction to stay in line with UK and Germany (number of ships, tech)

I never had war with UK or Germany, I manage to have alliances with AH and US.
Each new war with the "weak country" is easier, I tend not to sink too many enemy capital ships even when I have a clear shot.
I get all from Italy except homeland and Sicily* (*value is 12, max I can ask is 10)

Ps could we introduce in RTW1 (and RTW2) a wars counter to punish more aggressive behaviour? Or an event like "League of Nations punish you! Embargo! how do we react?"

[fredsanford]

I voted 'cheat' due to this sentence: "I tend not to sink too many enemy capital ships even when I have a clear shot." IMO, fomenting tensions and repeated wars with weaker nations is a legit strategy, but I think deliberately letting ships go when you have the opportunity to win battles is gamey manipulation.

Maybe having a major (US, UK, Germany) power ally with the weaker power that's lost a previous war would discourage the repeat war syndrome. I'm not sure how to handle the deliberate self-nerfing of a battle. I want to say prestige or crew morale loss for 'missed opportunities', but I don't know how the game would assess that versus simple incompetence. Maybe something like some logic that looks at starting force levels for large engagements, and if you have a favorable force level and conditions (good weather, daylight) yet don't score a certain victory level, the game hits you with prestige loss or your crew training drops due to morale loss.

[jwsmith26]

I would definitely say it is not a bug. As you have discovered the game encourages war so I have no problem with you taking advantage of this.

As for intentionally going easy on the enemy, well it's your game, do as you wish. The game permits it, and as fredsanford mentions it would be almost impossible to program a system that somehow knows you are doing this. I doubt the developers would prevent it even if there was a way to do it.

More to the point, do YOU feel it's gaming the system and feels unfair? If you do then it's a pretty simple fix - stop using the strategy.

[ccip]

Hmmm, well I'm curious to see how consistently that works for you! Can you ALWAYS get into war with the nation you actually want to be fighting? Can you get out of that war at the exactly right time, when you want?

I've heard everything from your perspective, to Bullethead a few weeks ago mentioning that his experience was "a war can happen with anyone at any time".

My experience has been somewhere in the middle - I can usually provoke war with a nation I want to fight, but it's not always predictable; ending wars has been more problematic, and often if I do let them go on too long, public unrest starts rising.

So, if you can do it every single game in a totally repeatable way, I'd consider it a game mechanic exploit - not technically a cheat, but something close to it.

But personally I suspect that if you do this more than a couple of times, you'll eventually end up in a situation where things go badly and you lose prestige.


If this relies on avoiding battles by accepting them but then just running your fleet away (instead of accepting battle), I would definitely consider that an exploit, but even there, there's a chance things could go wrong - if you meet a faster fleet, for example, or have a night battle where you get a valuable ship torpedoed suddenly.

Personally, since I basically "roleplay" all my games, I just don't do what a real admiral wouldn't do in a situation, so I just have my own "house rules" to avoid exploits. I pretty much have to - honestly, even very well-designed games always have something that can be unrealistically exploited, because they're games and you have nothing to lose (except your time!) by doing something risky or stupid in them. But since the whole point of playing games like RTW for me is to have a role-playing experience, as soon as I find an exploit, I find a way to make a rule for myself to avoid it so that it's not "I, the omniscient player" making that choice, but my poor clueless in-game avatar - e.g. when I find choices in games that become too predictable (where one answer is always better than all the others), I stop making those choices myself and roll dice/flip a coin instead to keep things more interesting!

[JagdFlanker]

i can choose whom i go to war with quite easily - i use max intel on the countries i want to fight and no intel on the countries i don't want to fight

[garrisonchisholm]

I am not going to vote, because I think there should be a 4th option; "A temporal artifact of a set of problem solving processes likely solved differently in RTW2." It cannot be cheating.

Something that is discussed exhaustively in the KSP forums is what "Cheating" is. If you are playing a solo game, and the goal of the game is for you to have fun, then if you are doing something that is fun for you in the game how can it be cheating? If you were depriving another player of their hard effort by "illegal" gains (like when I slip 2 extra $500's from the bank in Monopoly), that is cheating. Frederick's AI is not going to freeze the game, pop a massive sad face on the screen, and then say it is going home because the user is cheating.

[axe99]

Oct 28, 2016 19:50:23 GMT -6 garrisonchisholm said:

I am not going to vote, because I think there should be a 4th option; "A temporal artifact of a set of problem solving processes likely solved differently in RTW2." It cannot be cheating.

Something that is discussed exhaustively in the KSP forums is what "Cheating" is. If you are playing a solo game, and the goal of the game is for you to have fun, then if you are doing something that is fun for you in the game how can it be cheating? If you were depriving another player of their hard effort by "illegal" gains (like when I slip 2 extra $500's from the bank in Monopoly), that is cheating. Frederick's AI is not going to freeze the game, pop a massive sad face on the screen, and then say it is going home because the user is cheating.

Aye, this .  I'd probably see it as a bit of an 'exploit' rather than a cheat.  I see an exploit as a mechanic in the game that the player can manipulate in ways that the AI won't, to get an edge on the AI.  It's not cheating (there's no key combination to give shells infinite penetration or something like that), but it's not quite playing the game in the way the mechanics were intended (is my guess).  In single-player games, there's nothing wrong with exploiting (indeed (and sadly in my view), many single player games are designed to encourage it, although RtW isn't one of them) as we make our own fun .

[director]

After all, Tirpitz himself rode the increasing tensions and used the generated fear to expand his budgets. It worked beautifully - right up until it didn't.

[zardoz]

I am not convinced at all that it is cheating or it is a bug.

We are highly influenced by history as it was. And all the tensions from the late 19th century and the begin of the 2oies century culminated in WW1. But was this not avoidable? The late 19th century showed many "little" wars. Without WW1 this could have continued in the 20th century in a world without UN and it pre-runners.

So, I am not really convinced that in an alternate history without WW1 this would be totally artifical and gamey.

[oldpop2000]

Oct 31, 2016 2:09:56 GMT -6 zardoz said:

I am not convinced at all that it is cheating or it is a bug.

We are highly influenced by history as it was. And all the tensions from the late 19th century and the begin of the 2oies century culminated in WW1. But was this not avoidable? The late 19th century showed many "little" wars. Without WW1 this could have continued in the 20th century in a world without UN and it pre-runners.

So, I am not really convinced that in an alternate history without WW1 this would be totally artifical and gamey.

Actually, it was avoidable. Had the driver of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's car not taken the wrong turn and driven by the coffee shop where Gavrito Princip was sitting, there probably would not have been a world war. Sometimes it is just that simple. Of course, no one mentions that the Emperor was actually relieved over the assassination. He commented" God will not be mocked. A higher power had put back the order I couldn't maintain." The general consensus was that it was for the best. Nice people.

[oldpop2000]

Oct 28, 2016 19:50:23 GMT -6 garrisonchisholm said:

I am not going to vote, because I think there should be a 4th option; "A temporal artifact of a set of problem solving processes likely solved differently in RTW2." It cannot be cheating.

Something that is discussed exhaustively in the KSP forums is what "Cheating" is. If you are playing a solo game, and the goal of the game is for you to have fun, then if you are doing something that is fun for you in the game how can it be cheating? If you were depriving another player of their hard effort by "illegal" gains (like when I slip 2 extra $500's from the bank in Monopoly), that is cheating. Frederick's AI is not going to freeze the game, pop a massive sad face on the screen, and then say it is going home because the user is cheating.

I use the cheat codes for Panzer Corps all the time, it makes the solo games I play much more fun and less work. All games are entertainment for me.

[fightingflattops]

It is fun. I feel I push to the limit the AI, hope this stimulate a better AI in future developments.
In-battle AI is on par with me at Admiral mode, except for a few limits.
Strategy level AI nations is much more limited, I like to test a game limits, ship design copy is great as all submarine strategy.
France aggressive strategy, for me it worked 3 times in a row (not always perfect, once tensions with US made me loose a ship in construction).
Historically and roleplay wise I would expect Italy to side with Italy. I would like to see Italy offering France an alliance, or France forcing Italy in an alliance (instead of eating territories, then if France loose the next war Italy is free again), kind of Finland satellite state or Romenia or Cuba or Philippines with US.

[Fredrik W]

There is a possibility of AI nations allying to restrict player nation aggression if the player is playing too aggressively, though I am not sure if it kicks in often enough or in the right circumstances, it may be that it is too rare. Anyone ever had the message "Nation A and nation B sign a treaty to contain Nation C (= player nation) aggression"?

[director]

Fredrik, I have played very aggressively and I've never seen that.

[trenton59]

I've played a lot and not seen it either.