Illegal land-raising trick

[Buster's Uncle]

Say you're like me, and don't like water squares and do like terraforming -

Sometimes when the land lays right, you can raise land and get rid of that water a few squares inside the border of another faction without breaking treaties or triggering vendetta.

• 
   1) If low altitude and available number of formers permits, start raising land two squares away from the border.
   2) Raise the square behind it enough to raise the first square a level.
   3) Persuant to previous conditions and your need, do it again another square further out.

-You have to not complete a raising until the highest raising is done - with luck, nothing completes on the next turn before you can click on the outermost pending raising - or just behind, and "w" a unit to make sure it completes in the right order, from furthest to closest.

You have three levels to raise land that started under 1,000ft...

Obviously, this doesn't work when you've been doing a lot of raising in your own territory and the terrain slopes at maximum down towards the border.

...

For fun, an illustration in pictures - imagine I want to ruin one of the Spartans' jungle squares.  Watch the info on each square's altitude, which is indicated on the screen with a red arrow:







Now to raise the outermost square a level:



And again:



And again:



Note that the square went full rocky on the last raise - this happens sometimes, apparently randomly. 

Here's the new altitude of the square next in:



And the square closest to the border:



So it's time to go to the next turn.  I was indeed able to make it go highest to lowest.  Blue arrows indicate the newly-rocky highest square, now vacated:



And the final result, with altitude-sabotaged square also pointed out:





This was a crap example to make the screenies from, because there was a higher-altitude square in the way of more damage being done.  It was just the only game save I had that would do to show it at all - all the others on hand are turn one or after that slopes sharply right up to the border problem.  This was all I could supply today.

[gwillybj]

Terraforming to divert a river into my territory is one of my favorites. It started a lively discussion - something about Water Rights.
I suppose in SP it might be considered exploitive, because the AI doesn't complain. I never feel guilty about it, though, because I've had them do it to me. They were likely raising the land for some other reason, but they took my river just the same.
In MP, I'd say go ahead if the target is a human player, since they will see the act in progress and react.

[Buster's Uncle]

An interesting perspective - an exploit that's actually MORE ethical to use on a human.  You make sense.

[Nexii]

I've noted you can also lose sea resource bonus squares from raising.  Maybe this is already known.

[Buster's Uncle]

I knew about it. 

Patchers?

[gwillybj]

The sea bonus is lost, but it becomes a Unity pod on the land raised. This pod acts like any other: it might show up a monolith, a worm, a resource bonus, or whatever else is possible.

[Buster's Uncle]

That sounds right.

I keep forgetting that it does that, and was disappointed when I was raising land as recently as a few weeks ago - and I've been playing since the year SMAC came out.

[Yitzi]

If you provide a link of a game where the bonus-loss happens, it may be possible for someone to take a look at it at some point.

[Buster's Uncle]

A base on land that's turned rocky after it was founded:

[Yitzi]

An image isn't really that useful; what's needed for investigation is a savegame where you can do something to cause it to happen.

[Buster's Uncle]

I don't know when it happened, but it was caused by the square being raised.  As I mentioned already upthread, that happens sometimes to rolling terrain when you raise it - something on the order of 1/10th chance, as a wild guess.  Likewise with flat squares going rocky.  It's the only way I know of to turn flat terrain rocky.

The converse can also happen with lowering terrain.

If you really want to try it, here's the save attached right after I discovered it, though I'd been raising squares in the vicinity making echelon farms for a while and am not sure when it happened - but the base in question is centered and has 8-9 formers sleeping inside, as do all the surrounding bases.  If you lower the adjacent squares -and lower and raise and lower again- you ought to be able to turn it back rolling again before you run out of formers.

-Also, here's the player faction, in case you need it: http://alphacentauri2.info/My%20Custom%20Factions/MyWorms.zip

[Yitzi]

I'm not really up to doing that sort of thing at the moment, but perhaps when I get to it.  (Though if you can replicate it, that will make it easier to figure out what's going on and thus likely to happen sooner.)

[Buster's Uncle]

Okay, lowering adjacent land twice did the trick.  Dunno what good this save is, but here.

[Yitzi]

I tried using the first save and lowering adjacent land twice, and it didn't change.  Maybe I lowered the wrong squares.  Can you repeat it, but provide a save from just before the last lowering (i.e. the last former is in the proper square and just needs to "lower" command to change the rockiness.)?

[Buster's Uncle]

Okay - I'll do that later when I'm caught up and playing.