DaviddesJ said:
I've never selected my opponents. I would agree that selecting your opponents (or selecting your own leader, or selecting particularly favorable maps, etc.) undermines your results.
And this is one of the big problems with the HOF---unfortunately, there's no way I can think of to avoid it. But this is certainly a main reason that I've never been interested in participating in the HOF.
I don't see what the big deal is about selecting your civ, your opponents, and your starting position. Any combination you choose is possible through the random number generator that you have such an elfin child-like shiny object attraction to.
The random settings are there to play a random game, where you have to decide what sort of victory to go for as you play it. If you want to go for a certain victory condition and be the fastest to get it, you could force a loss every game until you got one you liked, but that's silly.
The point is, if all other things were equal, and the game were forced to be random, and no one was able to cheat, the top tiers would probably be occupied by people who had gotten similar opponents, civs, and starting positions.
I agree that randomness is fun sometimes, but so is focusing on getting that ship out as fast as possible, for some others such as me. You should try the HoF. You could play the huge maps at high difficulties, where simple reliance on a few exploits by casual players doesn't interfere too much with the good players. You're required to have the default number of opponents at those settings, which makes it hard to bluff your way through.
The main rule with the HoF that is wrong in my opinion is the starting era. I think it should be forced ancient. I don't have a lot of interest in future or modern starts.
This may be an "exploit," but the tech and resource trading are broken anyway. The AI will refuse to trade things that would be great for it, where I know I am offering the AI a significant advantage in exchange for something lesser, but it doesn't know that. It seems like it hardly ever works right. Generally, I out-research the AI, and I give away big-techs in exchange for several small ones. But if I'm behind, the trades it will go for and won't go for are often to it's disadvantage to spite me, rather than it looking for anything that could help it.
I don't think 5 or 6 per turn per resource is a bad deal, which is all I've been able to swing so far. Occasionally I'll get a high offer of 10 or 12, but have few resources to trade.
The AI performs better with more people, as a human does, just not as much as a human. Trading them resources gives them a boost to pop, so I'm reluctant to do it with some of them. In fact, I haven't tried it yet, but if I were to try a permanent alliance game, I'd probably want to do this with my ally, for 3-4 resources at least.
Civs getting crippled by "free resources" from other civs is something that has happened before, in life. An example is the American Revolution. It's not an exact model, but there are similarities. The Americans were being taxed for all sorts of goods that Britain had financially confiscated, and resold to them at a higher rate.
Maybe the levels to which you can do it are exploitative, but there should be some balance rather than only trading what spare cash the AI has at whatever percent they are running research that turn.
If I could buy several resources that I needed in one turn, for 5 or 6 each, from the AI, I would do it, even if it brought me to 10% research. But I can't, so I can't prove to you how great that would be.
I think it's less of an exploit, than just some very thin game logic. The AI should have a resource budget, rather than just whatever is gravy from research. And a smarter AI is possible. Until then, this will do. I have to conquer the resource to offer it in the first place, and I need to trade some to get other resources too. I find it to be relatively balanced in most games. Perhaps that's just me.