Talk:Bugs/@comment-26393217-20150617095954

Do you list exploits too?

1- Teleporting units:

When a unit can't access a tower to garrison or a mine to fill, it virtually teleports into it.

Perhaps, this is a designed feature to prevent units to be stuck, or allowing tower management when the entry square is blocked. This has several advantages, some of them could be seen as exploits.

- As long as you have unfilled mines, and spare builders, you may build as "tight" as you want even without eagles. If a builder get stuck, send him to a mine (this should be legit, and added in the hints, imho).The same is possible with Whisps: always use normal ones when building tight (it will teleport when forming an Ancient Whisp).

- Filling unsecure mines. You have a mine which path to isn't secure. Build a builder production building. Try and block its exit area with buildings and walls, so that a newly produced builder/miner can't leave the area. Assign it to the mine and he'll teleport inside of it. This is clearly an exploit.

- The trick thereafter (jumping cliffs).

2- Jumping cliffs:

It benefits from #1. Build a tower near a cliff (impassable transition between two walk-able terrains). Build buildings or walls around it, so that most of the adjacent squares are used. Garrison the tower. Ungarrison it. Some or all the units have crossed the cliff! I use this trick every time I happen to be confined in a closed area on a Random Map against IA (if I'm not bored of it). Well, you could consider there's a drawbridge, after all.

3- Experience for gold:

Your own buildings give 3XP the melee unit who destroy them (and your Hero as well).

The fact that you may attack your own buildings allows to destroy a misplaced building, or open a gate through your fortifications. This is certainly desired.

The fact that you can't do that with a ranged unit could be due to the necessity to shoot 'through' your structures when it defend your base. This is perhaps mandatory.

That means that for 20 gold (max price for a rempart) you may "buy" 3 XP for melee units only.

The Engineer skill, and similar racial researches which all rise building HP, don't help here of course.

This work with summoned structures such as Ice Wall, etc., although they get much HP, and far more interestingly, with Dark Portal and Circle of Power, which have very few HP.

One may question the utility of all of this micromanagement when facing a human player, and I play against AI, indeed.

If gold and time are not a problem, the advantages are:

- levelling-up frail units so that they become elligible for your retinue.

- levelling-up melee spellcasters so that they get level 5 (i.e. a huge difference).

- generally speaking, at low level, crossing the quality gap between a level 1 or 2 unit (<9PX) and a level 4 unit (20 PX), virtually questionning the use of a XP Hero's skill, and negating the advantage of a  magic-user (high intelligence) Hero faced to a fighter Hero, as far as experienced melee units are concerned.

To me, it's an exploit, on the same type, but not the same scale, of the one that was corrected in a patch, when before, you could earn XP by killing your own units, and even leech their experience (remember the infamous Fey illusion/necromancy shadows, and divination melee units eating sprites to level up fast).

4- Triggering item spells:

Spells that have a chance to trigger when your Hero hit something also trigger when you hit buildings, and even your own units/buildings (melee hit, see above).

I'd say that is an exploit, because those weapons (when they are weapons) should be deemed to work when used by a "fighter" in combat, not while sitting in your base, or even while poking at buildings.

Be lucky to get the Orb of Etheria at lowl level (level 5 Pyromancer's Inspiration) and your campaign is quite spoiled (triggering twice the Pyromancer's Inspiration spell at mastery 5 means 50 XP max).

Thus, protocole is: endure the enemy while building twenty troops or so, then build or use a sturdy structure (this time, Engineering helps), that I'd call a "Spell Altar", and attack it with your Hero. The trick is to combine a fast attack speed and a low damage output (if the item is not a weapon, equip a low damage weapon). The price of this is the price of the structure's reparation.

Of course, you can also do the trick half-way to a fight by hitting a high HP level 3 mine (better if an enemy one), but this is less an exploit: at least, you're on the field.

But what to think about triggering a Bannish spell not through fighting, but through hitting a Rempart you just got build near your battle location by an eagle or some summoned builder?

5- End mission unit bonus experience:

This is not really an exploit after all, but any neutral structure may be attacked between the instant when the AI resigns and the instant when the Victory button pops up (and the interface doesn't respond anymore). Most of the time, you get a few seconds to select one or more units and order them to destroy all the buildings on the screen in a queue, and then have a cup of tea (if piercing attack)... The unit(s) will gain 3 PX/building, sometimes a nice add, especially in case of a support unit rather than an offensive one. If I remember well, this works with your own structures, and even for ranged units.