Civil war in Libya, NES game Genghis Khan

[clueless]

I'm sure that we are all aware that some very serious events are occurring in North Africa and possible the Arabian peninsula.

However, whenever I read a news report of the events, I can't help but hear the "AI vs AI" battle noise from the NES game Genghis Khan. and see the little "war" animation (complete with clashing swords).

When I play Genghis Khan, I tend to start as England, take the two European nations to my south, and then invade Africa before pushing east into Europe.

There is also a nice bug in the game (rounding errors) that allows the human player to severely cheat. The game splits each year into 4 quarters (seasons). Each season, you can issue 3 orders in the country that you rule, and 1 order to any nations that you control directly. If you raise taxes, you people will lower their morale. If you give money, morale goes back up.

If your leader is in a country that is well protected from attack, then you can do the following to crank taxes up way high and still keep a high morale. I haven't played this game since the mid-90's so my memory might be off here...

(Nomenclature: 'A-n'. A = season, 'n' = command (1-3)).

A-1) Re-assign ALL citizens to the army, execpt one citizen in each of the other three job roles. Morale will drop.
A-2) Give a little gold (gold spread over so few citizens will make them very happy).
A-3) Move entire army OUT of the country to a neighborring one that you control.

B-1) Crank taxes to 99% (or whatever the max is). The real tax rate will go to something like 53% or so. Morale will plummet.
B-2) Give a fair bit of gold to your citizens. Morale will jump way up.
B-3) Give more gold. Morale++;

C-1) Move troops back in. Morale will go down a little, but sitll be really high.
C-2) Convert troops back to regular citizens (artesians mostly).
C-3) n/a.

I've diagnozed this bug via black-box testing while a child. I've not verified it with a code review (and I doubt that I ever will). But basically, you're abusing some rounding that occurs in a division routine. Also, the game does not properly adjust the morale relative to the tax base when converting troops back to citizens.


A simialr bug can be abused to purchase lots of arms for your army:

A-1) Convert troops to citizens (leave 1 troop left).
A-2) Buy lots of arms. Spend all $999 if you've got it.
A-3) Convert citizens back to troops.

You will now have a large, well-armed army for far cheaper then it would have cost to do it honestly. The game doesn't balance your arms when converting between troops + citizens.

Back to Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen. I can only hope that the situation turns out well for the locals and that they reject attempts by terrorists to rise to power. A free and democratic North Africa (and tip or Arabia) hopefully will be a good thing.

[UncleSporky]

Seems kind of odd to talk about an old game exploit in connection with the situation in Libya.

You reminded me of a totally different exploit I used in a totally different sort of game. I suppose it's off topic but eh.

The game is Theme Park on Genesis (and other platforms). It's essentially a sim game like RollerCoaster Tycoon. One of the types of attractions you can build is the standard unfair game of skill that awards prizes and cheats people out of their money. You can set the cost to play, the cost of the prize awarded, and the chance that people will win.

Well I noticed that you could actually make the prizes cheaper than the cost to play the game. I built a Hook-A-Duck machine, set the win rate up to 100%, but due to cheap prizes I still made money on every play. And it turned out that a high win rate was more important to the little carnival-goers than being expensive to play!

However, this eventually turned out to be a problem, as I had a lot of people wandering the park for hours with no money left to spend, hungry, tired and thirsty. I'd bilked all their money out of them on Hook-A-Duck as soon as they entered the park.

[clueless]

Ha ha ha. Nice. That's awesome, UncleSporky!

[tepples]

B-1) Crank taxes to 99% (or whatever the max is). The real tax rate will go to something like 53% or so. Morale will plummet.
B-2) Give a fair bit of gold to your citizens. Morale will jump way up.
B-3) Give more gold. Morale++;

US Democrats call this "sharing the wealth". US Republicans call it "socialism".

C-1) Move troops back in. Morale will go down a little, but sitll be really high.
C-2) Convert troops back to regular citizens (artesians mostly).

And the US calls this "VetJobs.com".

[In a tycoon game,] I built a Hook-A-Duck machine, set the win rate up to 100%, but due to cheap prizes I still made money on every play. And it turned out that a high win rate was more important to the little carnival-goers than being expensive to play!

Likewise truth in television. Compare the win-every-time candy machines in real life arcades I've been to.