Tradins subsidies with AI

How many top players do this practice (hand over gpt to trade it for resources to then cancel the gpt after 10 turns so AI gives you lots of gold)?

I definitely trade resources for gpt, but I never subsidize. Do top players feel this is cheating, or am I just making upper level difficulties harder on myself for no reason?

I do it. I think TMIT does it as well, or at least his post introduced the idea to me a few years ago. I don't think most deity players do.

Also you don't cancel the GPT after 10 turns. You trade your max GPT + (solo) resource for other resource. Then you pillage your copy of the resource, so you don't even have to make a big investment up front.

I don't consider it cheating either. All GPT for resource trades are cheating in the sense that the AI is almost always overpaying, because it has no way of evaluating how much a new resource is worth. Health = the same as happy = the same as double happy or double health = the same whether it's below its happy cap or 20 above it. The subsidy mechanism works only because the "available GPT" is finicky, pseudo-random BS. It seems silly waiting for the AI to randomly have a decent amount of GPT to trade. Optimizing involves staring at the resource tab literally every turn. There's far more game changing "abusive" things that we do every game that we don't think twice about because we've been doing them for years. Subsidizing utilizes the tools the game makes available to you. It's not so much a bug/exploit as it is being really sneaky. The AI already gives bad GPT for resource trades. The pillage button exists in the game. Surely the developers must have wanted us to do this
Some people have argued that the fist icon in BUG ruins the game because it makes DOWs predictable. Of course it does. But again "WHEOOHRN" is in the game. For some reason. I have to assume the game designers considered the possibility we'd figure out what that means.... and having to check it every turn is burdensome, so we get fists in the bottom right corner instead.

It's also important to note out that it is much more useful on some game modes than others -- and I think it helps balance them, which is why I don't see anything wrong with it. You need a lot of resources, and the AI needs to have a lot of cities. On pangaea (what I usually play) this trick is pretty useless, as you don't have that many resources, and the AI doesn't have a lot of cities. But imagine a larger continents game, where you fight a brutal war against two psychos for the early and mid part of the game. You manage to get to a lot of cities, but you're hopelessly behind. I think it's perfectly fair to trade your resources for a lot of GPT to catch up -- and it's perfectly realistic.

It can also be used to push a runaway AI into financial trouble. Again when you get discover another continent you might see four civs evenly balanced, or one civ 3x the rest running away with the game. With subsidies you can extract say 200 GPT from that AI, which significantly slows down even a deity AI. This may seem very lame, but from the perspective of balance I like it. After all you had no input as to what the AI land ratios would be like on the other continent. If they're all equal you will have an easier game, and coincidentally subsidies won't be as important, but against a runaway now you have a tool to bring him more in line.

I don't use that exploit, and never have. This is cheating, and the only thing why it's allowed in HoF and GOTM is because there's not possibility to track it, but the CIV-Devs have always tried to prevent this form of cheating, and in CIV5 it's even forbidden by HOF and GOTM rules.

I do accept though, that opinions on this exploit seem to vary, but extracting 200 GPT from a runaway AI, Jesus. If that's not cheating, I don't know what cheating is.

I prefer war until the end with a runaway civ.
If I don't it is very likely that monster civ will vassalize every other civ and
I will lose the game by votes which has happened in one of my last games.

Seraiel said:

...but the CIV-Devs have always tried to prevent this form of cheating...

Click to expand...

Why wouldn't they just cap each trade or the total of all trades to one partner or all partners? I would think it to be a very easy solution. I'm not arguing for or against the practice, I've never done it myself just out unfamiliarity with it, but the developers could surely put a stop to it if they wanted.

Selling a resource to an AI when they get zero benefit from it is an exploit which I think nearly every top player does; subsidising to make sure they give you maximum gold is just a more extreme version of the same exploit.

i am confused on how subsidies are profitable though. The idea is that you gift the AI gpt, then trade him resources for that gpt, then cancel the gpt you are giving the AI right? Then wouldn't the AI just cancel the resource deal once you stop subsidizing it?

The AI unfortunately isn't clever enough to cancel the deal, as it thinks that it was a fair deal.

You don't even have to wait 10 turns to cancel the subsidy if you include a resource that you only have one of with the subsidy: just pillage the resource and your subsidy is cancelled.

That's why people are calling it an exploit. The AI doesn't know to cut the deal off because it is too expensive. The AI will only end the deal once they have their own source of that resource. They don't even try to get a better deal with another civ.

I coulda sworn this was stopped in Warlords bc the AI immediately reconfigures their slider after the gift. I tried it once by gifting 1gpt and the available gpt didn't change (it stayed at 2gpt). Unless their slider is already maxed out (meaning 100% commerce allocation) you may actually see their available gpt go DOWN after a gift bc they've raised the slider.

Because of this, I don't even think an argument can be made about this being exploitative or not since it has been brought under control. That is, of course, unless you still play vanilla.

pob said:

The AI unfortunately isn't clever enough to cancel the deal, as it thinks that it was a fair deal.

You don't even have to wait 10 turns to cancel the subsidy if you include a resource that you only have one of with the subsidy: just pillage the resource and your subsidy is cancelled.

Click to expand...

If you rebuild the improvement after you pillage it, is your subsidy still cancelled?

EDIT: Just loaded an old game up and I was able to fully use this technique. I must have had bad luck in the past with how much gpt the AI was willing to trade.

@pob and @jackelgull I just did a worldbuilder test in both BTS and Vanilla (fully patched for both) and I couldn't get the GPT to change at all. I had Friendly relations with Gandhi and a good deal of gold to trade. He had 1 GPT and I gifted 3GPT. The available gpt didn't raise above 1gpt. Maybe it's because I didn't set up his empire enough for him to be willing to trade more than 1? I don't know. I haven't seen this work once, though. Maybe I'll load up an old savegame and try it out.

Is there anything special that I need to do to get these guys to have their GPT raise up? I really could have sworn this was already corrected by the dev team in one of the patches.