Exploits

On this page, you will find a list of exploitable bugs in the current game versions - things that are very likely to be fixed/changed in future.

### 119 pop

Dismissing workers/engineers normally isn't possible when the city population is 20 or more. There is, however, a missing check for the number of workers you're trying to dismiss. So, if you have 100 workers in a city that has size 19, the game allows you to dismiss all 100 of them and reach population 119. Of course, happiness and health of such a city aren't going to be great. There's a social policy, World Health Organization, that gives 8% health per scientist, however, and the game's Auto setting for jobs even knows this, so it will set the scientists accordingly. And artists, to give you enough happiness as well. However, for technical reasons, the autoassign doesn't run nearly as often as happiness/health checks, so you have to do this action while the game is paused, otherwise you most likely lose the city to revolt immediately, and if not, a lof of the population will die very quickly from plague. With sufficient happiness boosts from various sources (especially Valhalla, Odin's power) you can actually manage completely without artists, at the cost of high hundreds of troops in each city. (Level 12 Valhalla + 800 troops = 250% happiness), thus effectively having all your cities with about 57 population available for other jobs than scientists.

*Likelihood of being fixed:* very high. This is a classic exploit, obviously unintended and downright bugged mechanic.

### Insta-gold transfer

Transfers of gold are currently bugged, so if you abort the transport shortly after initiating it, the game calculates the return time to the originating city, but actually sends the transport to the target city.

*Likelihood of being fixed:* very high. This is a classic exploit, obviously unintended and downright bugged mechanic.

### Cluster bombing

This milks the mechanics of rewarding science AND faith for units killed under Odin's 3rd spell - AND the fact that certain units have effectively zero HP and can be therefore slaughtered in extremely large numbers. The details can be found in the linked thread, but as a simplification, it involves amassing a lot of defenseless units in a city with a lot of gold to support them, abandoning said city and quickly taking it by force, killing the huge non-army inside for the spell reward.

https://www.kongregate.com/forums/1066161-cividlization-2/topics/1902647-midgame-endgame-guide-for-odin-god-of-blood-sweat-and-faith-v1-3-6

*Likelihood of being fixed:* average. It will probably get somehow nerfed (plentiful possibilities - exclusion of defenseless units from killcount for the spell, AI aggresively disbanding units in abandoned cities to bring them to sensible levels)... It's not exploiting a bug, but it's something the developer most likely didn't expect and want in the game.

*Important note*: you won't get rewards for your own killed troops.

### Attack avoidance

Barbarian attacks currently cause very little damage. Barbarians never send governors and at least early (confirmation?) don't send slavers - so sometimes the best defense is moving everything valuable out of the city just before the attack lands and cancelling the transfers just after it lands (see above for gold though).

Even better, if you manage to capture the originating city before the attack lands, the attack becomes dud and does no damage. This can be coupled with the cheating AI (barbarians will launch attacks at your cities very soon after they become undefended) to lure the barbarians to attack a city farther from them than another city where you have an army with a governor, and once they attack, take their now weakened village before the attack arrives.

*Likelihood of being removed:* very low, but I can imagine that the cheating AI will get revisited, and also barbarian attacks could a) land even if their village is no longer their b) do more damage in an undefended town (rape and pillage anyone? happiness tanked, buildings damaged/destroyed...)

## Increasing chances of rise up

Although the situations might be rare in which this is applicable, you could construct farms around enemy cities to increase their growth, which also decreases over time the happiness and thus increases the likeliness of an uprising.