EDIT: This is a glitch-discussion thread now!

The bugs currently labeled as glitch can now be found under the Game rules. These glitches are just allowed in Any% runs

Original post:

considered as a glitch:

• warehouse-destruction: The bug that allows you to upgrade an enemy warehouse to instantly destroy their island.

• warehouse-conquest: The bug that allows you to place a warehouse using enemy resources.

• save-load-enemy-control: The bug that allows you to use save-loads to take control of enemy players.

• goldsheep: The bug that allows you to turn brought materials into another one by replacing the building.

• crop-hold: The bug that allows you to plant and harvest any crop on any island.

• path-hold: The bug that allows you to infinitely harvest any crop for an indefinite amount of time.

• Battleship: The bug that allows you to build battleships in a small shipyard

• save-load disaster avoidance: The bug that allows you to remove fires and plague outbreaks by saving and loading.

not considered as a glitch:

• The trick that allows you to sink any ship by timing your white flag-/ and attack-pattern.

• The trick that allows you to hide your ships in bay-areas.

• The trick that allows you to sink a ship by continuously clicking on the target.

Source:

I'm not quite sure I agree with labeling the save-load thing as a glitch for clearing fires and plagues. The game is old and keeping the save data as small as possible is definitely intended. They could have made it so these events would be saved with the game but they clearly decided against it. You're exploiting the way the game works. It's not a programming oversight, so calling it a glitch seems wrong to me.

By the way, I'm surprised the rules do not appear to ban the in-game cheats though. I think that should be specified, even if it's kind of obvious those would be banned for every category.

Hello Geta92,

I understand your objection and it is quite justified.

The categorization of what is a glitch, I have made myself. So this merely represents my opinion.

I am also relatively new to the speedrun scenes. I've been watching for a relatively long time, but I've only been active for a short time, so I don't have much experience yet.

What I could determine in my observation time, however, is that communities to games themselves define what should be considered a glitch and what not. This happens in the course of votes of all interested people of the corresponding community. When such a vote can be representative for Anno 1602 is difficult to assess, since only very few are currently active.

The basic idea was to list the save-load mechanic as a glitch. Otherwise, runs with this bug would not be legitimate in case of a later decision that this is a glitch and one would have to give time penalties or take the run completely out of the rating. This was to be avoided. You can always go the other way without any problems.

For my part, I am of course positive about a survey.

Regarding cheats: So-called "cheat codes", which exist in Anno 1602, are already forbidden by the website with the site rules. So there is no need for an explicit mention here.

Kind regards invi

By the way, there are also a few small things I did not include in the video:

1. Speeding up the Resource Check: One thing I can still remember very well is that mashing the eye button for checking an island speeds up the speed at which the check is finished. Each additional click seems to half the time required to complete the check. That one definitely feels unintended and should be labeled a glitch.
2. Hiding Soldiers: You can hide soldiers inside blocks by telling them to enter a block and placing something solid there right when they enter it. This prevents enemies from attacking them unless they destroy the building you hid them inside.
3. Avoiding Curses: It is also possible to avoid being cursed by killing the main tribe house and saving after the building is destroyed but before the curse message appears and then loading the save. The timing for this is very tight though. This is similar to the fire / plague trick. I'm not even sure if curses are saved with the game though, so maybe doing this is just plain worse than just saving and loading after getting cursed.
4. Extending the Island Building Range: Placing buildings on the edge of your islands building range and removing them extends the building range by the footprint of the used building. If a house uses 4 blocks and just 2 of them are inside your range, you gain the 2 extra blocks the house used on deleting the house. This is only temporary though. The range is recalculated on saving and reloading the save. Still, it can allow placement of stuff further away by sacrificing a few cheap pioneer houses. City Gates are also useful for this since they can claim 2 extra blocks and only use stones as a material resource.
5. Building on Rivers: If you destroy a bridge or watermill, the tiles they were on can be build on, even the ones that used to be water tiles. This can be accomplished by attacking with a soldier or ship or (just for the watermill) by removing your warehouse. You can also do it by just saving and reloading if you used the prior trick to extend your building area temporary.
6. Removing Enemy Soldiers: This one only works in the original release. If you select an enemy soldier with the information tab, you can pay to release them from duty. This cost will be subtracted from the original owner of the soldier, not by you. You can delete an entire enemy army and they’ll pay for it. You can also tell moving enemy soldiers to stop this way. That one serves not much of a purpose, but it works in all versions.

that is really very exciting! If you still think of something, then you can post it here :) Thanks a lot for sharing!

Do you have any plans to look further for glitches at some point?

Must see what we label it as a glitch and what not

let's turn this into a discussion thread.

The bugs currently labeled as glitch can now be found under the Game rules. These glitches are just allowed in Any% runs

I'm not sure if there are any more glitches to be found. But if I come across something, I'll add them to the list for sure.

It looks like there is actually more to be found. Some of these seem irrelevant but some could be useful. I found these after posting the previous comment:

1. Wireless Trading: It is possible to trade with an island with a ship or market carrier from far away by opening the trading window and moving the carrier or ship away one tile at a time. For ships, it seems to be limited to a straight line, so you cannot choose a path where the ship sprite would need to turn. This seems pretty useless but who knows?
2. Watchtower Glitch: If you place a wooden or regular watchtower inside an area you control but your warehouse gets destroyed, the area is kept in your control for as long as the watchtower is not destroyed. This is not temporary as the saved area is even kept on reloading the save. Maybe this is intended, but it’s hard to tell. This quirk can be used to keep an extension you build using the other glitch I posted above.
3. Moving Repair: If you place a ship next to a shipyard, activate its trading route and quickly press the repair button, it will be repaired while moving to its specified location. You can pre-set a trade route to just go to an enemy island trading nothing in order to attack the island while taking care of the repair on the go. This works for as long as you don’t manually command the ship to move somewhere else by selecting it and clicking on the water.
4. Breaking Building Restrictions: Click on the building you usually can only build a limited amount of. Then click on a different building group and back on the group that contains the building you originally clicked on. Hover over your land until the yellow highlight appears and quickly click on it and keep the button pressed down. Wait a few seconds and the building will eventually update. You can then build the building you originally selected as many times as you want by moving the mouse. Doing this ignores any building restriction other than the lack of required materials.

Hey, this all sounds very exciting. Tomorrow the university starts again, so unfortunately I won't have time to take a closer look at these things. But with time I'll look at it for sure. Thanks again for sharing :)

Do you know how you triggered the fast mission complete screen with this mission? I have done that mission a few dozen times and for me, it pops up way later, even if I play on the same language settings and use speedup.

I have no idea, I wondered about it too. I didn't force it in any way, I was just lucky.

Hm, I'll try looking into that. If the time between getting the mission complete sound cue and the end screen is random, it would be a bad decision to time runes with it. The ??? money or sound cue + ? at the bottom bar might be better.

Thanks for the research! I'm very curious if you find something :)

The "??? money" does not always show up, even at 60 FPS not always. I have checked this on other runs. So this is a bad indicator. Noise indicators are also not suitable as they are not frame accurate to detect (at least to my knowledge). And the "!" in the infobox below can also potentially stand for another message that randomly pops up and could falsify the time by a few frames.

I'll talk to the other mods what they think.

But we can discuss here to find a solution. Of course we are interested that everything is timed as fair as possible :)

Yeah to me its just plain old luck. sometimes I get it to work first try, other times It doesnt work even if I try it like 20 times.

We talked about it in DMs already. It seems like for player kills or island takeovers, the game checks the mission instantly. But for anything else, the game checks every X seconds in the background. So if you're unlucky, you might get an especially long delay until the audio message plays. As far as speeding up the following fadeout goes, it seems like finishing the mission on the lowest game speed and then switching to the fastest right when the audio message starts playing works the best. I assume the audio-to-fadeout delay is fixed but determined by the game speed you were on when it was triggered, so speeding up makes it play out faster. You can also close the game once the audio message plays manually through the save menu. The mission complete bonus is shown even before the mission complete would appear automatically. It's set as soon as the audio starts playing. That should still count as a legit end screen as long as the mission bonus is on there.

Hello,

Thank you very much for your contributions. I have rechecked all the runs again individually and come to the following conclusion:

• the "!" in the info box can be used as an indicator for all runs

• if this is not possible, e.g. because the "!" is not visible, the mission ending screen is considered the end of the mission and the time is stopped at its first frame

• if mission completion videos are activated, the first frame of the video sequence is counted here

• Exceptions to this are, for example, the Tutorial and Continuous Play missions; these missions have their own rules

• the mission ending screen must be shown at the end of all missions

• it is recommended to activate audio commentaries, this makes it easier to find the right frame, but is not mandatory

• I ask for a vote via the comment function for these conditions (of course, suggestions for improvement can be made, if they make sense, a new vote can potentially take place)

• if these conditions are accepted, all runs will be re-timed

Kind regards, invi

Hi, thank you all for this interessting discussion. Setting up clear and fair rules can be a difficult task. In my opinion you nailed it pretty well and I would accept invuln3r4bl3's suggestions. Keep and gaming big :)

Cheers

Hello dear Anno community, please still participate in the vote I posted here in this thread on 11/15/2013. Thank you very much :)

Btw: I have published a small research project on the explorer icon at . Feel free to take a look ;)