cabert said:
There is an easy way to test it.
Try selling an happiness resource. See what you get.
Then try selling a health resource. See what you get.
You get the exact same amount of gold.
Meaning that the "need for the resource" isn't a factor.
So the trick is to trade health resource to expansive leaders and happiness resource to charismatic leaders... And to never trade health and happiness to the same leader.
I see. So what you mean is that they do not base the price on the usefulness of the resource. I thought you were saying that they already had x amount of happiness and none of their cities had gotten to the x+1 stage. I can see that the AI is rather rudimentary on this point, but when I hear "exploit" I usually think of some glitch that breaks the spirit of the rules. This seems to me just understanding how the rules work and playing accordingly.
cabert said:
I can see a good value for coal and I can see why you would be ready to make a disproportionate deal for it.
But you cannot build transports and destroyers with coal, can you? You need oil or uranium...
You can however build ironclads, which don't travel across ocean, with coal
Yes, I see that I was being somewhat incoherent in my attempt to be brief. The reason I needed the coal was that Alex was killing all of my fishing nets with his frigates and I needed ironclads to defend them while I teched up to combustion for a counter-attack. I had forgotten that when I was writing this post. But the point remains the same. I had to sacrifice my future in order to pay for a resource I needed now. I guess your point above indicates that the AI does not necessarily make this detailed of an analysis, so I can see how this analogy is not as good as I thought it was. But what the AI does could make sense from an economic point of view, so I still don't see this as an exploit in the usual sense.
Also, I think the original post exagerates when it says that you can ruin the AIs economy by using this method. In order to do that, there would need to be at least three factors:
1. The posession of surplusses of multiple resources by the player.
2. The lack of these precise resources by the AI (and no prospect of gaining them).
3. A very low level of commerce for the AI (so that the loss of the subsidy would actually be a significant portion of the total economy).
I don't see any of these elements being a reliably present in the majority of games. Having multiples of some resources is possible of course, but the very fact that there is an abundance of them is likely to make them available to the AI. The case of monopolies is rare (my comments above notwithstanding
) and usually only occur in one or two resources in any event. I just don't see this as a significant problem, although I agree that it would be nice if the AI was a bit deeper in its analysis than seems to be the case.