Dear Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition Dev Team,
I’m writing to report a severe exploit I encountered in a PVP match yesterday (2026/03/08), which directly led to my loss. The exploit gives an unfair economic advantage and ruins the competitive integrity of the game.
The opponent utilized a bug that caused their Villagers to gather coins at haciendas several times faster than normal (approx. 3x-4x speed). This gave them an insurmountable economic lead, allowing them to win the match unfairly.
Please prioritize fixing this exploit as fast as you can and ban players who used this bug before. Thank you very much!
(Chinese characters in this picture means that
Maya can exploit a bug to improve the gather rate of coins, this picture only reached 10.08 per second, it can go even higher.)
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Looks to be a custom map. By an chance there was the Hanover natives (not seeing it in the minimap, but it can be chosen if the map has the native wagon with options)? There is a certain weird interaction that can mess up the gather rate with the Hanover Victorian Era, but I have only seen it with Maya only.
It’s Atlas my guy. Not a custom map.
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Well I don’t recall Atlas having a gold mine and having back tree, which is common in most custom treaty maps.
I guess someone must have decrypted it and made a custom version.
Well, Mex OP in treaty but not that much. He must be hacking or something?
Not hacking, more of an exploit. In fact I just realize it can be done without Victorian Era which is quite concerning.
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A version of this should be dropped in the bug report section of the forum as well. This is the discussion section, and if the game hasn’t been entirely abandoned we should be using the bug report section for bugs.
I recommend you explain how to perform the exploit step by step; that way, developers will be able to replicate it. Furthermore, since it’s a publicly known exploit, they won’t be able to ignore it.
The more people who know about it and can replicate it, the more likely it is that they will have to patch it.
So how do we do it? For research purposes…
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Okay, that made me laugh. XD
I don’t play against anyone and I never use the Mexican civilization. (I only play PvE).
I also understand the distrust, but given the circumstances, either you all abuse this strategy and force the developers to do something about it, or we can trust that this case will not receive the same treatment as the rest of the errors.
Someone on Discord was describing a bug with the Maya Ceramics tech that is probably this.
It sounded like the tech could fail (I’m assuming due to not enough room to place the crates) but still apply the effect of the Tonala Ceramics tech. So each time you sent it and it failed you’d get +15% coin gather rate, and since the card would fail it wouldn’t even cost a shipment and could be done over and over again.
Update - I tested it and that’s for sure the bug. All you have to do is block the shipment point so it fails and you have an infinite +15% coin upgrade that doesn’t even cost a shipment.
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It also can be done on other shipment. It refunds the shipment and fails the delivery, but will still counts as a shipment going through, therefore the x amount of shipment units can be exploited in supremacy, especially given with certain faster shipment speed upgrades. The other bug with the Victorian Era is that you can both Revolt & get Imperial upgrades (for only a few revolts) if you queue both tech and age up at the same time.
That was a pretty old bug that I thought they fixed. Do you know which revolts get around it?
As far as I know, the Revolutionary France & all of Mexico Revolt. It can also be used to refresh unit shipments for a third time, which only benefits a few niche shipment such as the battleship bonus. But again, more of a treaty thing to get done.
So is the exploit that if a shipment is canceled due to the shipment point delete then the effect still goes through but the shipment is refunded?
That feels a bit too broad and feels like it has to be something more specific.
edit: yeah this thing is very strange. The shipment doesnt stop when the shipment point is deleted like every other shipment.
There also doesnt seem to be anything special about it either.
I would not be able to tell from looking at the techtreey file that anything strange would happen
Its not a flag interaction either.
ok testing this for a bit
Its “something” to do with the Yucatan revolt.
After you revolt to Yucatan, shipments dont fail automatically if there are no shipment points which I cant seem to find any reason for. They still come and apply their effects
This then doubly interact with Maya Ceramics which for some reason doesnt mark the shipment as already sent even though the other cards do have this interaction. It sends the shipment failure message which is very strange, the other cards just apply the effect and doesnt refund.
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I tested it some more and it’s really inconsistent as most of the unit shipments actually do go through and you just get less or nothing if there isn’t room. However, a few cards like the Yucatan factory shipment and Maya ceramics would fail and let you resend them over and over again, and also increment the shipment count each time they fail.
I’m wondering if the subtype “ResourceAsCratesByShipmentCount” is contributing to the issue since Maya ceramics is the only place that’s used. It’s kinda redundant when “FreeHomeCityUnitByShipmentCount” can do essentially the same thing if you specify crates as the unit sent. When I tested the Maya Tapir per shipment card that uses “FreeHomeCityUnitByShipmentCount” it was normal and would just give you nothing if there wasn’t room.
I’ll try changing Maya ceramics to use “FreeHomeCityUnitByShipmentCount” when I have time and see if that will cause it to fail normally. There’s also “FreeHomeCityUnitByShipmentCountResource” that’s used for livestock that might even be able to set a normal crate to 200 so the effect stays similar.
But even if that fixes the main issue it still leaves a lesser exploit of inflating the shipment count with other failed shipments. So one could send the Yucatan factory shipment and have it fail several times so that they get more crates and Tapirs from the Maya cards.
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its stranger then just having no room, you can delete all shipment points on the map and the shipment would not cancel
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I tried it with this setup and it fixed the infinite sending exploit. If there’s no room you just don’t get the crates and the shipment can’t be resent.
I added the fix to my balance mod if people want to play without the exploit.
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