Until the developers can come up with a better definition of "exploit" than "whatever Johan and Wiz says is an exploit is an exploit", identifying which in-game actions constitute exploits and which ones are merely effective play will be *necessarily* convoluted and inconsistent. Different standards are applied to that word every time it gets used.
Devs make the game with a specific vision of what they have in mind for the game, so, yeah, they
do get to define exploits. If they think a certain feature violates what they had in mind for the game, then they have every right to call it an exploit and remove it, as it is not part of the envisioned rule set they had in mind.
Different standards are applied to that word every time it gets used.
It's almost as if the world isn't black-and-white, but dynamic and based on a multitude of ever-changing factors that can make one arrive at different opinions at different times over similar or different issues...
Remember, carrying animist decisions into your switch to Buddhism is supposedly an "exploit".
Err...yes, because you were no longer animist, thus you didn't get to keep the animist buffs since you weren't animist. Just like you no longer get to keep Catholic buffs when you switch to reformed/protestant.
But picking a nation that begins the game Catholic is not an "exploit".
If you used any relevant standard to gameplay strength, picking a Catholic nation is more of an "exploit". But people don't talk in those terms, and developers don't change the game in those terms.
...No, because that's not what is going on. Catholic is not inherently any more powerful than any of the other major religious (Hindu/Protestant/Reformed/Orthodox/Sunni/Shia/etc.). It,
is however, more powerful than the "primitive religions" like shamanist and animist...which makes sense, since part of the whole point in how they are designed is that these old religions are supposed to go extinct. You can still keep them, but generally, you are better off using one of the more powerful main religions.
Was building ships as a primitive an exploit?
Was blocking the Bosphorus?
Yes, it was exploity as all Kanye to allow you to beat the Ottomans by building tons of ships as Byz. Of course, we could adopt a more realistic system where ship building is constrained by a
lot more factors, such as the amount of wood and building material around, make ships have a more realistic representation of maintenance where they can easily eat up half your GDP and so on, and not just the amount of money that you have, but then that would just hurt everyone else even more. The blocking that exploit is a far more elegant solution than making large navies far more painful to build to begin with.
On what criteria does something become an exploit?
On the grounds that the developers think it's an exploit because they think it does not fit in line with what should be the rule set for the game.
At one point both were WAD mechanics that functioned precisely the game's original design intended; Ottomans even picked naval ideas to compensate this weakness back in 1.5. Now, magically it's an "exploit"
It was always an exploit. If the Ottomans had to pick an idea group to beat a small nation then there's something wrong there.
It's so bad that more than once in this game, players and developers alike have called *demonstrably-inferior-to-alternatives* actions "exploits", as if you're somehow exploiting the game by deliberately picking a weaker option that's novel.
Except in many cases those "weaker" options gave you far more power in the long run. E.g. the overseas coring cost as the Ottomans which let you almost double your development when fighting the Mamluks and only pay a fraction of the coring cost you'd normally need to pay (which would already be ridiculously cheap due to Ottoman ideas and admin group usually being the first idea group chosen). In the short run, but in the long run, you'd be substantially more powerful because you get all that development for like ~25% of the cost, and all you had to do was wait in connecting your lands, which itself wasn't a problem, since the Mamluks are already easy enough to throw around with your base territory.
