Bugs that allow cheating

[Tijn]

#12037

Voxel pointed out to me on IRC that the game has a couple of bugs, mainly regarding movement, that are exploitable if you want to.

The main problem seems to be that some actions reset a unit’s movement counter. This isn’t such an issue for units who can only move a single square, because once you’ve done your one move, you can no longer select it and do anything with it.

But there are also units which can move 2 or more squares. If you do a move with such a unit, then set it to sentry and then take it out of sentry mode again, its movement counter will be reset. This way you can move a chariot all across the map in a single turn. Whoops!

A similar problem appears to happen around loading/unloading ships. You can load a unit onto a ship. A unit with a single square of movement will have depleted its movement points by doing this. But when you then select the ship and press u to unload, you can still move the unit. I’m not exactly sure if it fully resets the counter or just gives you one additional movement, but there’s definitely something going on there.

I’m also told it’s possible to load settlers onto ships and build roads out into the ocean, but I’ve not tried that for myself yet lol

Anyway, please share your bugs and cheats here if you know any!

[slamo]

#12038

I actually tried the trick with the roads in the ocean! I bridged a one-tile water gap between islands and it does make a funny little dirt road in the water, but the game doesn’t actually let you use it unfortunately. Upgrading it to rails doesn’t help either.

However, some (useless) glitchy behavior I noticed is that if you put a water transport unit on top of this water road and then try crossing it, the unit enters this weird glitch state where it turns invisible instead of blinking when it’s ready to move. You can still move it from there, it’s just weird that it briefly can’t be seen at all.

[Wesbat]

#12050

Building a road on water gives you a trade bonus if you work those tiles. Moreover, building a rail on water increases food and trade by 50% – so more food from fish tiles, more trade from open ocean.

Bribing an AI civ to wage war on another AI simply won’t happen. So don’t waste your money trying.

To “Go To” order can send your units into odd directions, particularly when it has to travel across the map seam, where the world wraps.

The score screen (F9) draws icons of wonders you discovered, and if you discovered many wonders the icons flow off the bottom of the screen. Since VGA memory is linearly addressed, the icons overflow into the memory segment that stores the game map. This corrupts the north-pole, spawning strange land-masses and sometimes units.

Be forewarned, the following bugs will spoil you.

The Settler improvement rush bug: order a Settler to mine or irrigate, re-activate the Settler and give the same order again, repeating this sequence until the improvement is completed, all in the same turn.

You can buy buildings and wonders for less, by switching production to a cheaper unit, buying it to completion, then changing production back to your building or wonder.