Too Easy to Exploit the Game Design

As anyone with even a modicum of experience in this industry knows , some players will do anything to win, including cheating and finding and using the holes in the game design. Such players are completely unrepentant about such play. They argue that if an action isn't blocked by the design and code implementation, it's a feature, not an "exploit." On one level these players have a point; it is up to the developer and designer to plug such holes.

Turn -based conquest games lend themselves to these holes. In essence, they are number- crunching games ; the number and power of attacking units versus the same for the defending units determine the outcome of battles . Once you get past even odds in a battle, very little is left to chance or random factors. Think of it as Risk on a somewhat grander scale.

When UC was designed, too little thought was given to how these relatively few players could exploit design flaws to create unfair advantage. Especially in the early stages of a campaign, UC was weak in preventing one person from having multiple accounts to feed one master account to exploit the design.

Referred to as MACs by players, multiple alias cheaters were perceived as one of the biggest problems of the game. Using this exploit, one player would establish several game aliases on The Zone then use them all to join a single UC campaign in the hope that two or more would be within supporting distance of each other on Turn 1. The "mule" accounts would send starting military units as trade fleets to the "master" account. Even with the random starting placement inherent within the game code, a player using four or five accounts had a pretty good chance of having at least two accounts within mutual supporting distance. Those "mule" accounts that were too distant to be of help could be restarted to try for a better placement closer to the "master" account.

This would give the MAC player a huge advantage at the onset of a campaign, effectively doubling or tripling his/her military units and planetary building resources. It would be like one player in Risk receiving 50 armies starting on Turn 1. No other nearby player could compete with that kind of power.

A similar design exploit could be and was used constantly by teams of players. Instead of one player with multiple accounts, teams of players ”with sometimes as many as 10 participating ”would designate one player as the "master" account and would "feed" his/her home planet with fleets, which also effectively stripped their planets of defenses for an easy capture. Those players would then restart the campaign and, if luck placed them in range, repeat the procedure. In this way, teams would rotate who got to win or place highly in a campaign. Even nastier, sometimes teams of MAC players would band together and totally overwhelm the local competition within 10 turns of a 30- or 60-turn game.

This type of exploitive gameplay drastically altered the odds for a few players in campaign after campaign. Players who relied on diplomacy to try to create alliances with other players just couldn't compete. Thus, the "fair" players would participate in one or two campaigns , not make the top-50 rankings (and thus not be eligible for the occasional Master's Tournaments), and then just not play anymore.