What's new
Frozen in Carbonite

Welcome to FiC! Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Hilarious Gamebreaking

Horton

Cat
Administrator
I'm interested in various glitches or poor thought out mechanics that well



Here's one as a start :p
 
Spiff's Civilization infinite money video is pretty good too.
I've played multiple games that had non linearity in game mechanics. I guess being able to cobble code together doesn't mean you necessarily have to understand basic math.

Amusingly enough, XF has similar bugs, but they're more related to how many people are on the forum at once and that's not something you can "exploit", (unless you're a blackhat with a massive ass botnet of XF bots). One of the reasons why SB keeps crashing a lot these days.
 
I've played multiple games that had non linearity in game mechanics. I guess being able to cobble code together doesn't mean you necessarily have to understand basic math.
Firaxis has a history of both A. seemingly doing astonishingly little playtesting of their game and B. having astonishingly little comprehension of their own game mechanics. 4 was the exception in this regard since they took a lot of community feedback during the development, although it still had the typical gamebreaking launch issues, but those were less "broken OP loophole" and more "game literally does not work".

But I could rant about Civ all day. Anyways, glad to see someone else discover Spiffing Brit, I've been watching his strategy game stuff for a while now, his forays into other genres generally not being so entertaining. His Civ 6 attempt to flood the world with global warming is also worth a watch in my opinion.
 
Firaxis has a history of both A. seemingly doing astonishingly little playtesting of their game and B. having astonishingly little comprehension of their own game mechanics. /.../ But I could rant about Civ all day.
Could you elaborate? I'm not very familiar with the Civilization series other than 4, and I'd like to know what you think.
 
Could you elaborate? I'm not very familiar with the Civilization series other than 4, and I'd like to know what you think.
Well I mainly played 3, 4, and 5, haven't really gotten into 6 for various reasons, so I'll be talking about those mostly.

It's a mix of both not catching literally game-breaking bugs and also not realizing egregiously obvious problems that anybody who actually played a full game would be able to notice. Civ 3, 4, 5 all had major crashing issues on launch, but Civ 5 multiplayer stands out as being completely unplayable when it first came out due to the constant crashes, indicating it was very definitely rushed out the door with zero playtesting.

You had people making stuff like this: https://www.change.org/p/2k-games-fix-civilization-v-s-multiplayer-now

With Civ 3, the major balance issue was that gameplay seemingly intended to favor tall play, with corruption making it so that cities more than 1-2 dozen tiles out from your capital suffered from so much corruption that they could never develop, but at the same time the lack of a penalty mechanic made it so that every single city added to your empire was a net plus no matter how little (due to corruption), leading to actual optimal gameplay consisting of furious landgrabs and very wide play.

With 5, well, where do we start? First off, on launch they balanced the game to hilariously favor wide play. City-state bonuses were per city while terrain tile bonuses were shit, meaning the optimal playstyle was to build as many cities as possible with no regard to where they were, which also made you militarily unassailable because cities now can attack too, so your Infinite City Sprawl doubles as an unconquerable continental fortress of overlapping fire. The CivFanatics guys realized this within about 3 days of launch and were posting playthroughs of them stomping Deity level AIs, when normally Deity level is supposed to be "if you play absolutely perfectly you can barely scrape out a victory about half the time". Then Firaxis realized that this was dumb, but then rebalanced things too hard in the opposite direction by buffing the empire size penalties to be crippling, so that the optimal number of cities was always 4, leaving huge amounts of the world uncolonized and barbarian-filled even into the modern era.

Then there were issues with the combat AI being just hilariously awful all around. You had players conquering entire AI empires using 3-4 horsemen because the AI could not comprehend two-move units that could attack and retreat on the same turn, which meant that they would live forever and rack up massive amounts of promotions. This led to horsemen getting nerfed hard early on (rather than, you know, improving the AI).

Oh and there's the weed they were smoking with diplomacy. Like, diplomacy is pretty bad in 5 even after the patches and expansions, but on release all the AIs might have as well been coded completely based on dice rolls, they'd declare friendship one turn and then insult you the next with no apparent rhyme or reason, then there's the fact that all AIs in 5 will eventually come to hate you no matter what, which AFAIK is still more or less true.

Just generally it's the kind of issues that would be solved by having a high-level player go through 2-3 games, Civ 5 in particular these issues were being noticed on CivFanatics within a week of launch, it's not like they were particularly obscure, you just needed someone to actually understand the game mechanics to play the game a few times.
 
Well I mainly played 3, 4, and 5, haven't really gotten into 6 for various reasons, so I'll be talking about those mostly.

It's a mix of both not catching literally game-breaking bugs and also not realizing egregiously obvious problems that anybody who actually played a full game would be able to notice. Civ 3, 4, 5 all had major crashing issues on launch, but Civ 5 multiplayer stands out as being completely unplayable when it first came out due to the constant crashes, indicating it was very definitely rushed out the door with zero playtesting.

You had people making stuff like this: https://www.change.org/p/2k-games-fix-civilization-v-s-multiplayer-now

With Civ 3, the major balance issue was that gameplay seemingly intended to favor tall play, with corruption making it so that cities more than 1-2 dozen tiles out from your capital suffered from so much corruption that they could never develop, but at the same time the lack of a penalty mechanic made it so that every single city added to your empire was a net plus no matter how little (due to corruption), leading to actual optimal gameplay consisting of furious landgrabs and very wide play.

With 5, well, where do we start? First off, on launch they balanced the game to hilariously favor wide play. City-state bonuses were per city while terrain tile bonuses were shit, meaning the optimal playstyle was to build as many cities as possible with no regard to where they were, which also made you militarily unassailable because cities now can attack too, so your Infinite City Sprawl doubles as an unconquerable continental fortress of overlapping fire. The CivFanatics guys realized this within about 3 days of launch and were posting playthroughs of them stomping Deity level AIs, when normally Deity level is supposed to be "if you play absolutely perfectly you can barely scrape out a victory about half the time". Then Firaxis realized that this was dumb, but then rebalanced things too hard in the opposite direction by buffing the empire size penalties to be crippling, so that the optimal number of cities was always 4, leaving huge amounts of the world uncolonized and barbarian-filled even into the modern era.

Then there were issues with the combat AI being just hilariously awful all around. You had players conquering entire AI empires using 3-4 horsemen because the AI could not comprehend two-move units that could attack and retreat on the same turn, which meant that they would live forever and rack up massive amounts of promotions. This led to horsemen getting nerfed hard early on (rather than, you know, improving the AI).

Oh and there's the weed they were smoking with diplomacy. Like, diplomacy is pretty bad in 5 even after the patches and expansions, but on release all the AIs might have as well been coded completely based on dice rolls, they'd declare friendship one turn and then insult you the next with no apparent rhyme or reason, then there's the fact that all AIs in 5 will eventually come to hate you no matter what, which AFAIK is still more or less true.

Just generally it's the kind of issues that would be solved by having a high-level player go through 2-3 games, Civ 5 in particular these issues were being noticed on CivFanatics within a week of launch, it's not like they were particularly obscure, you just needed someone to actually understand the game mechanics to play the game a few times.

Yea classic favs catching the *RELEASE NOW! FUCK PLAY OR BETA TESTING!* bug that seem to permate everything nowadays is a massive downer.

For all the good stuff fast internet and multiplayer brought I miss the days you had to exhaustively test a game because it was too difficult or outright impossible to put out fixes if they were for platforms.

You were reasonably certain that anything else aside the game would not be a horrible buggy mess.
 
If you want to watch gamebreaking, there is always QuietteShy's non-Warframe videos, in which she somehow breaks every game she touches.
 
Spiffing Brit made another video about Skyrim exploits:


The second half is just the alchemy/enchanting loop that everyone and their mother knows about but some of the stuff in the first half was new to me, like the location of the Khajiit merchant chest.
 
Back
Top Bottom