Rush-buy bug/exploit in DA 1.80g

Ok i noticed that if you select a building, i think i payed attention to it only with super projects or trade goods. Anyways if you select a project from the list and click "buy" you pay full prize. But if you place it first on something and then select it from the queue list and hit "buy", its prize is affected by that previous building. I got some crazy reductions like 6000->500 BC, if placing it on an Industrial Sector. Seems like a bug to me.
19,787 views 30 replies
Reply #1 Top
There has always been a difference between the "Build" of a building from scratch verses the "Upgrade" of a building that was already present.

IIRC if the building you're upgrading to is of the same type, such as upgrading any economic building to any other economic building, then you get credit for the full production cost of the previous building. Same is true for morale, production, research or influence buildings.

Also even if the building is of a different type you get some percentage of the cost of the building however I have no idea what that percentage is.

All this makes legitimate sense to me and in any case is how the game has worked forever.

Your example of a super project that costs 6000 bc to rush buy directly only costing 500 bc if built over an Industrial Sector seems a little extreme too me. However the Industrial Sector costs a bit over 4400 bc to rush buy so if you're talking about a special project/trade good that's production related and actually costs 5000 bc then I could see how paying an additional 500 bc sounds about right.
Reply #2 Top
regardless of anything else it should ask for the same prize regardless from where clicked, since they are pointing at the same tile( or in case the are pointing to the same tile). Extreme? well, look.






Reply #3 Top
regardless of anything else it should ask for the same prize regardless from where clicked, since they are pointing at the same tile( or in case the are pointing to the same tile). Extreme? well, look.
End of quote

No they should not be the same price even though you are putting the hyper computers on the same tile. In one case you are upgrading a Neutrality learning center (which if I recall correctly is a pretty expensive research building) to a research type trade good. I would think this upgrade would give you credit for the cost of the Neutrality Learning Center.

In the first case you're simply buying the trade good without regard to what was on the tile. If you first demolished the NLC then built Hyper Computers then that's what you would have to pay.

As I said the first time this is exactly how the game as worked since version v1.2 of DL for close to 2 years. This is nothing new in DA v1.80g. It's not a bug. I suggest that you pay the 462 bc and don't look a gift horse in the mouth. :)
Reply #4 Top
The only one we are cheating on, are well, ourselves. Thats like calling CTRL-U a gift. I can imagine this exploit can give significant advantage to those metaverse players who know about it.

If you first demolished the NLC then built Hyper Computers then that's what you would have to pay.
End of quote

Yes. But that NLC is there and isnt demolished and the prize doenst correctly reflect this. Not even talking about how hilarious it is to buy an unique galaxy building for a prize of a farm or whatever.


This is nothing new in DA v1.80g.
End of quote

This isnt a justification for the bug. That thing for sure should show the same prize, and most probably shouldnt be affected by any previous building, since its an unique project.

Reply #5 Top
The only one we are cheating on, are well, ourselves. Thats like calling CTRL-U a gift. I can imagine this exploit can give significant advantage to those metaverse players who know about it.
End of quote

That would be every single one and anything that is an advantage to everyone is an advantage to no one.

I don't know specifically what ctrl-u does but whatever it is requires cheats to be enabled which are prohibited from metaverse games.

This isnt a justification for the bug. That thing for sure should show the same prize, and most probably shouldnt be affected by any previous building, since its an unique project.
End of quote

It's a research trade good upgraded from a research building. This is not a bug. This is works as specified.

In any case, regardless of what you call it I can pretty much gaurantee that this will never be changed.
Reply #6 Top
Ehm you seem to address some different topic. Whether or not unique buildings should be affected by previous structures is debatable. Makes no sense, but still debatable. There are even longer lasting bugs in the game, see MCC.

The bug is that is shows different prize while it should show one, with the NLC selected. Which one is correct is unknown.
Reply #7 Top
Hyper Computers costs 540BC. An NLC costs 500BC. If you upgrade an NLC to Hyper Computers (and have not previously upgraded the NLC from something else), the 500BC of the NLC will be credited towards the cost of the Hyper Computers-if you rush buy. This -should- bring the Computers down to a cost of 40BC, or a rush buy cost of 342BC.

Upgrading over an NLC that I bought, I see the 342BC that it should be. Upgrading over an NLC that I -built- (from scratch, even), I'm seeing a value much, much lower than it should be. Going to get to that in a second, but first let me say that I have verified the following for industrial sectors as well; it's not just an NLC/research building glitch or "thing".

Apparently, the game is not factoring the cost of the original building into the formula, but rather how much industry (not cost, as the half of bonus production that is free makes no difference in my significant but admittedly not rigorous testing) you've actually spent on it. So by doing 4 turns of 100 production and then a turn of 39 production and then a fifth turn of 100 production on an NLC, I was able to spend 539 on it, giving a difference between it and the Hyper Computers of 1, or a rush buy cost of 6BC. Observe:



However, this makes your 462BC upgrade cost all the more interesting, as it would seemingly dictate a 52BC difference in cost vs. industry spent, which, thanks to the fact that the Hyper Computers is a constant 540 cost, means you must have somehow built an NLC while only spending 488 to do so-which should be impossible.
Reply #8 Top
By the same argument, upgrade ships would have to demand the full cost for the new ship. It doesn't. You have something, you upgrade it into something else. Therefore you only pay the difference.

Only with buildings, there is no explicit 'upgrade' button - that functionality is implied when you click on a tile that already has a building on it.

Works perfectly well, just as it should.
Reply #9 Top
The hot-keys card that came with DA does not have any Control-U listed. If you know of an action from Control-U please describe it.

My experience is exactly as M says...if you place a new building on a tile that already has something, the game calls it an upgrade and the buy price is reduced. My impression is that this is true regardless of whether the old and the new buildings re related.

Reply #10 Top
As a note, in my above post I meant 488 industry spent, not 488 cost. I think I mentioned that difference already, but I don't want anyone to get confused.

And pndrev, your post made me unable to submit my edit. Incredibly annoying. But no hard feelings.

I'm going to try making the image clickable this time.



@CalifDude
Ctrl+U requires cheats to be enabled (as Mumble mentioned), and it unfogs the map.
Reply #11 Top
The bug is that is shows different prize while it should show one, with the NLC selected. Which one is correct is unknown.
End of quote


Im not sure how much clearer it could be made to you mate, but this is not a bug.

Think of it this way. You own a $5K(NLC) car and wish to buy a $20K(Hyper Comp)car. When you go to the dealer ship the salesman will (for arguements sake) offer you $5K for your car if you buy his $20K car. So now your only going to pay $15K for that $20K car, you essentially upgraded from your 5K one to a 20k one for only 15K.

Now if you did not have the 5K car you would have to pay the full 20K.

Same principles apply here.

They are both correct, one assumes you are trading in the NLC on the HC and the other assumes you just wish to buy the HC outright. This principle is applied all across the game. It is not a bug mate.

Hope this helps. :)

Reply #12 Top
So what's this prize he keeps talking about, and how do I win it!?
Reply #13 Top
There are even longer lasting bugs in the game, see MCC.
End of quote

This is exactly the kind of point I'm trying to make. A known bug that actually turns into a valubable feature that is used by everyone really isn't a bug. By your example if the MCC were suddenly to get "fixed" after all these years there would be huge complaints.

However there is nothing longer lasting than forever which is how long both of these "undocumented features" have been in the game.

This also goes in the other direction as well you know. Take an expensive building like the NLC that you show and try the same thing with a cheap building like a starport. You'll still find a difference between the upgrade versus the build cost but in this case it's the upgrade that will be more expensive than the buy cost. The buy cost of a starport is 156 bc. Upgrades appear to have a minimum cost of 438 bc (although I have seen exception to this "minimum" upgrade cost). Try it.
Reply #14 Top
Hyper Computers costs 540BC. An NLC costs 500BC. If you upgrade an NLC to Hyper Computers (and have not previously upgraded the NLC from something else), the 500BC of the NLC will be credited towards the cost of the Hyper Computers-if you rush buy. This -should- bring the Computers down to a cost of 40BC, or a rush buy cost of 342BC.
End of quote

Sole Soul, this is very interesting. I know exactly what you're talking about but I've never seen such a specific relationship between the production cost in terms of SP (social production units which of course cost 1 BC each when the item is actually produced) versus the cost in BC of a rush buy.

Usually these relationships seem somewhat "fuzzy". I think the reason that they tend to be fuzzy is that it does seem at times that there is some percentage credit that you get for everything that has been built on that tile throughout the entire game. So for example, if you first built a basic lab then upgraded through each research building until finally upgrading to the NLC then as long as the production spent exactly built each building then the final production cost spent over the life of the game on that particular tile is 500BC. But I do believe that the game actually credits you with "excess" production spent on the tile. For example if you built a building that "cost" 300BC to build and your social production was 80 then you would spend 4 turns producing the building during which you spent 320 (SP actually). I believe that you get this extra 20SP credit if you later come back and upgrade that tile again. Then it really gets unknowable once you upgrade to a building of a different class. Although you mention you tried upgrading over IS as well which implies no loss to upgrading over a building of a different class.

Anyway back to my real question of your analysis. You give a couple of different figures that relate build cost to rush buy costs. These figures seem to be different ratios but certainly seem to come close to predicting rush buy costs. Can you tell me where and how you got these ratios.

Anyway you list the following ratios.

Build 40SP -> Rush Buy 342BC -> 8.55BC/SP

Build 1SP -> Rush Buy 6BC -> 6BC/SP

Build 52SP -> Rush Buy 462BC -> 8.88BC/SP

These differences are too great to simply be due to rounding. Anyway as I said I found your analysis very interesting but I'm not able to quite follow it precisely. How did you derive these relationships?
Reply #15 Top
They don't just "come very close", they're exact. ;)

Sorry, had to do it.

Rush buy cost = (base cost ^ 1.1) * 6. Of course, one needs to keep in mind that (base cost ^ 1.1) is truncated, as are 99% of the things in this game.

I don't remember how I derived it anymore-I just sat down and looked at the numbers one day and it jumped out at me.

I had two separate scenarios here, but they don't need to be differentiated, so I made it one.

Simply, for a building that is bought, credit is only given that has not previously been given (with full credit obviously being given for the first buy-but not the first upgrade). What this means is that when I rush buy my basic lab into a xeno lab, I get 40 credit towards it; but when I rush buy my xeno lab into a research center, I get 60-40 for 20 credit towards it. However, for a building that was built, it is just the total social production spent on the building in question, which as you saw, can actually be more than the cost of the building.

This still begs the question of how Roller was able to get a 462BC upgrade cost for Hyper Computers over an NLC, as that means he's getting 488 credit towards it, and I don't know of any improvement that only costs 12BC that he could have upgraded over with the NLC in question.
Reply #16 Top
The hot-keys card that came with DA does not have any Control-U listed. If you know of an action from Control-U please describe it.
End of quote


With cheat codes enabled, Control U removes the fog of war and of course the game cannot be submitted to Metaverse. I assume that the fog is removed for the AI as well as the player and it does slow the game down substantially on a large map.

Regardless of the financial calculations, none of the building cost issue is a big deal to me because it does not unbalance the game in your favor. Of course you can say that the AI would never be smart enough to do the upgrade but there are many instances of that. The AI is never going to win in zero years either. It is also a fact that when you capture a planet you get credit for invested cost of sany ship not completed, so you can buy a ship for little or no cost.

Everyone has their own threshold of right and wrong. My 5 year old grandson will not spend a found dollar even if it is impossible to know who the owner is. "It is not mine" he says.

Do what you gotta do, it is a single player game
Reply #17 Top
Rush buy cost = (base cost ^ 1.1) * 6. Of course, one needs to keep in mind that (base cost ^ 1.1) is truncated, as are 99% of the things in this game.
End of quote

Nice.  :CONGRAT:  Yeah they do use a lot of fractional power functions in this game. This information is very significant. I don't think it was previously known. Very good work. This information should be added to the Wiki.

And you say that you get full credit even for buildings that are not of the same type? I think you mentioned that you checked the Hyper Computer upgrade over an Industrial Sector as well as over the NLC. I though you only got a percentage of credit for non same type upgrades.

for a building that was built, it is just the total social production spent on the building in question, which as you saw, can actually be more than the cost of the building.

This still begs the question of how Roller was able to get a 462BC upgrade cost for Hyper Computers over an NLC, as that means he's getting 488 credit towards it, and I don't know of any improvement that only costs 12BC that he could have upgraded over with the NLC in question.
End of quote

Doesn't the first part answer your own question?

If the building that the NLC was upgraded from had been built with an excess production of 12 units then doesn't that account for this discrepancy?
Reply #18 Top
I just had an experience in the DA game I have going now that led me to a tactic I hadn't thought of before. (I'm member 2993604 here, and if I post this I expect it will turn out that 2993603 other players thought of it before I did.)

This tactic depends on the fact that in DA, if you switch starport construction from one type of ship to another, the game gives you credit for the work already invested in the first ship and applies that to production of the new ship. If the new ship costs less than the old one, this can result in a ship being produced in 0 turns.

Assume the situation that AI troop transports are approaching some of your colonies where you have no ships in orbit, and you want to produce ships...any kind of a ship will do... at those colonies immediately. You can rush buy ships, but even empty cargo hulls cost enough that you might want to avoid that if your treasury is low. The asset you might overlook, as I did in my game, is that if you already have a ship under construction at a colony, you might have enough cost invested there so that you can switch to a lower cost ship and pop it out at the beginning of the next turn or in only a few turns.

I didn't do this in my game and I actually lost a colony, because I didn't know that DA gave you credit for work already done. I'm used to playing games where, if you change construction, you start over. Later in the game, I changed construction at about seven colonies from costly battleships that I didn't need, to constructors...and behold, when I clicked Turn, I had seven new constructors just like that.

Reply #19 Top
Sole Soul
Very interesting analysis thanks. Heh, 6bc for an unique wonder. Im glad this game has no multiplayer. The only number which seems logical is 6000. I guess i rushed that NLC. If youre saying only invested industry is counted that would explain it.

pndrev
By the same argument, upgrade ships would have to demand the full cost for the new ship.
End of quote

You cannot even upgrade ships. To those with different hulls. A regular building and a wonder are way more different than that.

Mumblefratz
This is exactly the kind of point I'm trying to make. A known bug that actually turns into a valubable feature that is used by everyone really isn't a bug.
End of quote

Getting wonders for nothing isnt valuable. Its an exploit, which isnt detected by Metaverse. I bet AI players dont get their wonders for nothing.

Franco fx
because it does not unbalance the game in your favor.
End of quote

Saving 5000-6000 money on each unique building sounds pretty unfair and stealing that project from the AI even more. Especially in the early game. Where there are problems to even start getting money in the first place.
Reply #20 Top
A regular building and a wonder are way more different than that.
End of quote


To us, yes. Apparently, the game engine treats them both simply as 'building'.
Reply #21 Top
@Roller123
The basic idea is, you already spent that 500 on the NLC-you basically just rented it. Now you're taking that money and, because the game is so nice, putting it towards the Hyper Computers.

The basic idea is sound. There's nothing really wrong with it.

I do understand where you're coming from, as you could get God only knows how much use out of an NLC and then just upgrade it into a trade good for mere pennies, but that's really just how the game works.

The only real problem I see with it is that the current implementation can result in ridiculously low figures, such as the 6bc upgrade cost I presented. A better solution would seem to be to factor in total cost in place of total social production used.

It does, however, intrigue me that the game actually remembers the social production spent (only from the last level, though) for each and every built improvement in the game. On the one hand, this is impressive in and of itself, and shows that there is far more capability in it than (probably) most of us had imagined. On the other hand, I can't help but wonder how much RAM that's taking up.

(As a note-the cost system I've mentioned versus the current total production spent system, due to both using differences from the previous value, have essentially the same RAM usage, if applicable. The only real way to cut down on that would be to change the discount to purely cost-based [basically calculating the current difference on-the-fly, rather than storing it], which I think overall would be good but it would change a lot of things. This would free up some space-though I honestly don't know how much or if it would be significant at all-but would increase the CPU load marginally, but in all honesty, anything above my old 900MHZ Thunderbird probably wouldn't notice the difference.)

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@Mumble
No. 540-52=488. Computers = 540, rush buy cost = 462BC = base cost of 52BC. This means we need to come up with 488 credit for a 500 project, which means we need the difference to be 12. If we, for instance, have a starport (at 20) and spend 32 building it, and then rush buy an NLC on top of it, we get 32 credit towards it and pay the rush buy cost of 5190 at a production cost of 468. This means if we then build something on top of the NLC, we only get 468 credit towards it. This would result in our Hyper Computers being treated as a 72 production cost, which would become a 660 rush buy cost.

The bottom line is based on the math I don't see a way to do it without a planetary improvement that costs 12 (of which there are none), or, alternatively, two planetary improvements for which the difference is 12 (of which there are, not surprisingly, none). It doesn't matter how many times or numbers you add and subtract that end in 0 or 5, you're never going to get a number ending in 2 out of it, and particularly no 12.

(If you add decommission into the mix, you might have something, but in theory it resets the counter to zero, and in practice decommissioning something, anything, has no effect whatsoever on the build or rush buy cost of something else built on that tile.)

-

I would agree that this is yet another thing that the human player can do (and in fact fairly well) that the AI simply cannot, but this is more largely a matter of the AI not backbuilding/overbuilding than anything else; I'm certain it's intelligent enough to handle upgrades sufficiently, although I've never paid much attention to what kind of rush buy upgrading practices it keeps. But it just won't ever occur to the AI to replace an Embassy with a Level 1 Manufacturing Matrix, for instance (TA Thalans are pretty much the prime example of this, so I had to use them).
Reply #22 Top
Sole Soul
The basic idea is, you already spent that 500 on the NLC-you basically just rented it. Now you're taking that money and, because the game is so nice, putting it towards the Hyper Computers.
End of quote

yes well, the basic principle is understandable. I cant really say its a bad thing either. Keeping track of a previous production is a pretty handy feature and not being able to switch production during builds always annoyed me in other similar games. But obviously there are some side effects, like this one where it is possible to pregenerate "build points" for something which is supposed to take time to build.

Here is the save-file if you wanna see whats happening. (400Kb) The world is Dester-II.
Reply #23 Top
I dont think much. hmm 100 bases per player * 10 factions * 72* tiles * integer 2 bytes= 144000/1024=140KB

Anyways here is some more funny:

Edited: err, how in the hells did you make it work with thumbnails Sole Soul :)



Reply #24 Top
Hi!
Apparently, the game is not factoring the cost of the original building into the formula, but rather how much industry (not cost, as the half of bonus production that is free makes no difference in my significant but admittedly not rigorous testing) you've actually spent on it.
End of quote

Sole Soul, thank you for this info! You confirmed what I've suspected for a long time, but never managed to test.

Rush buy cost = (base cost ^ 1.1) * 6. Of course, one needs to keep in mind that (base cost ^ 1.1) is truncated, as are 99% of the things in this game.
End of quote

Another nice piece of work! I agree with Mumble this should be posted on wiki.

Unfortunatelly there's one problem: how this explains the fact that sometimes the cost of upgrading is actually higher than the cost of razing previous building and build a new one there? It could be dependent to a different type of both buildings (most of the time I see it there), but IIRC it's not limited to that.

BR, Iztok

Reply #25 Top
@Roller123
That's not funny at all. Thalans are Super Hive...they get to build factory improvements at 25% cost (as soon as they're put in the build queue). This affects rush buying as well.

At least, I'm assuming you're playing Thalans. If not, it IS funny.

I made it work by using [ link="http://link.com/" ][ img ] Imageshack thumbnail link [ /img ] [ /link ]; essentially replacing the [ url ] & [ /url ] tags it provides in the thumbnail link with the [ link ] & [ /link ] tags...but also enclosing the URL itself within quotes, so as to make it function with the link tags.

There's unnecessary spacing in the above example so it'll show up plaintext, but you get the idea.

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@Iztoc
Based on my experiences with this over the past couple of days, I have to say it should (almost) never cost more to upgrade a building than to decommission the building in question and build from scratch. I do remember this being alluded to once or twice (probably in the wiki), but I don't know that I've ever actually encountered it myself.

The one exception to this would be if the building you're upgrading to costs less than the building you're upgrading over, as this means the upgrade cost is treated as 50; however this would (obviously) only cost more for those improvements that cost less than 50. This, I have encountered.

So if you're seeing this when you "upgrade" a research academy into a basic lab, that's nothing strange. If you're seeing it when you upgrade a research academy into a discovery sphere, that IS.

If what you're seeing are scenarios where the second improvement costs more than the first, and the upgrade cost is more than that of building from scratch, could you please attempt to duplicate that for the benefit of the rest of us, preferably keeping track of the total social production spent on the improvement in question (or rather, the difference in total social production over time if using multiple upgrades on the same tile to demonstrate)?

If you have time.