Additional Uses for Subsidies:
1. Extortion:
All GPT deals are restricted by the amount of Available GPT the AI has in stock. Subsidizing allows you to bypass this limit, and so opens up a new world of options, namely "Coercive Bargaining" or "Protection Fees".
How to make use of this?
- Get a Large and Threatening(tm) army.
- Look for a weak Civ somewhere in the world, who you think might like to "stay in buisiness", but might be too much hassle to "take care of" yourself.
- Having selected your victim, offer them a nice gift, say 15-20 GPT to ease up their finances.
- Demand a repayment in kind, but for a substantially larger sum (if possible, they may still be restricted by their trading limit.).
- If the first "trade" was not enough, try this again and again to see how much you can sqeeze out of the little sucker. You may have to keep pumping them up with GPT so that they can afford your demands.
- After 10 turns are up, go ahead and cancel your side of the bargain, but their tribute will still be coming in.
I won't even pretend this is not an exploit, since any sensible player would cancel their tribute to an AI guilt-free after 10 turns were up. This will theoreticly allow you to soak your victim nations for a significantly larger chunk of change than you could normally, since a 0GPT in diplomacy can't limit the tribute. The AI will faithfully send it's moneys to you basicly forever once the deal is made, ending only if one of you declares war on the other. The best part about this is that you don't need to actually
have any other resources than just a large military. Your relationship may suffer, but do you really care? If they don't like paying, then you can just tax them like normal citizens of your empire (after you 'assist' their citizenship).