Trading Resources with the AI tip

[Johnpecan]

So I know this advice is probably obvious to most players, but seeing as I've gotten to emperor/immortal level and only RECENTLY learned this, I figure it might be helpful for others too.

I used to always trade resources with the AI by selecting one of their resources and then asking them "What do you want for this?" This almost always results in me getting ripped off, 2 for 1s, 3 for 1s and sometimes ridiculous trades.

The correct way of trading resources to the AI is to offer something of YOURS and then say "What will you give me for this?" Then when they make your offer, (for an example, let's say I offered Iron and they said they would give me rice for it) cancel that offer. Then put Iron in your trade window, rice in theirs and then say "What would make this deal work?". Often times they will throw in a couple gold or even another resource.

This way of doing business with the AI is important because they will only give you the minimum. "Making this deal work" causes them to be a bit more honest with how much they really want it.

So the main point is to offer your resource first (note sometimes you'll have to try to offer different resources to get the one you want) and see what the AI will give you. Don't be a noob like me and ask what the AI wants for their precious resources.

Another note, the media wonders (hit wonders, musicals, singles) are HIGHLY coveted by the AI. Assuming the AI has it for trade, you can almost always get any health/happy resource for exchange for these. Which is one reason why these media wonders are so great (Electricity is probably my favorite tech in the game).

 

[DaveMcW]

Summary:

The AI is willing to buy duplicate resources, but will only pay pennies for it.

So the goal is to identify a resource they DON'T have yet, and milk it for all it's worth.

 

[Delan]

I usually play on Noble, so I don't know if resource trading is easier, but it's actually much better than this. Once you can trade for gold, open a trading window for each AI. You can see how much gold the AI has in income, and that's what's available for trade. You can tell which resource the AI needs or is willing to trade for because it won't be in red type. If you have more than one of any of these, simply offer one to the AI, but specify the amount of gold per turn you want, which should be the maximum the AI can trade. The AI will almost always accept the deal. You don't need to ask the AI what it will give.

I've been doing this consistently and have gotten 15-18 gold per turn for a single resource like cows, rice, and whatever. How the AI feels about you doesn't seem to matter, so long as you're not at war.

I almost consider this an exploit. So long as I have extra resources I can generate tons of extra income this way. The AI will cancel the trade if it can make a better deal with another AI, but I don't often have these trades cancelled.

 

[kazapp]

Actually, I find the trade UI to be a bug.

Correct implementation would mean having the human (you) press a single button to get the best deal possible out of the AI.

The fiddling around might be good to simulate how real deals are made, but this is a computer program, and its design should be geared towards minimizing unnecessary button pushes!

Also, there should be an AI governor to tell "keep track of all my deals, and renegotiate them each turn something better comes up". Breaking up a deal and remaking it for, say, +1 gold/turn more than previously.

These repetitive tasks should not have to be done by the human when the computer does them so much better. And it really is a shame you can get bonuses if you're willing to put up with boring grind work like that - it really means the user interface is getting a poor grade.

 

[dubrown]

The biggest issue with trading in my opinion is how the AIs value gold in trades. You can trade a cheap tech for a fortune of gold. It's not often I've had a deal turned down just because I only asked for gold in return. This normally funds upgrading my obsolete elitetroops or alllowing a huge deflict due to my overrexing. And there's always one AI with too much cash on their hands so there's tradeoptions in most cases.

 

[Clam Spammer]

I usually play on Noble, so I don't know if resource trading is easier, but it's actually much better than this. Once you can trade for gold, open a trading window for each AI. You can see how much gold the AI has in income, and that's what's available for trade. You can tell which resource the AI needs or is willing to trade for because it won't be in red type. If you have more than one of any of these, simply offer one to the AI, but specify the amount of gold per turn you want, which should be the maximum the AI can trade. The AI will almost always accept the deal. You don't need to ask the AI what it will give.

I've been doing this consistently and have gotten 15-18 gold per turn for a single resource like cows, rice, and whatever. How the AI feels about you doesn't seem to matter, so long as you're not at war.

I almost consider this an exploit. So long as I have extra resources I can generate tons of extra income this way. The AI will cancel the trade if it can make a better deal with another AI, but I don't often have these trades cancelled.

How the heck did you get that much gpt out of the AI? I'm on Noble too and I've never seen an AI with more than 6gpt available (unless you meant 15gpt out of all the AI civs combined).

Speaking of resource trading tips, I have something to add. Grains for meat is a good trade - you get +2 (granary), the AI only gets +1, but they place the same value on both.

 

[obsolete]

Actually, I find the trade UI to be a bug.

Correct implementation would mean having the human (you) press a single button to get the best deal possible out of the AI.

The fiddling around might be good to simulate how real deals are made, but this is a computer program, and its design should be geared towards minimizing unnecessary button pushes!

Also, there should be an AI governor to tell "keep track of all my deals, and renegotiate them each turn something better comes up". Breaking up a deal and remaking it for, say, +1 gold/turn more than previously.

These repetitive tasks should not have to be done by the human when the computer does them so much better. And it really is a shame you can get bonuses if you're willing to put up with boring grind work like that - it really means the user interface is getting a poor grade.

That is exactly right. You don't need to have a Masters in software engineering or interface design to know this is a terrible implementation.

Myself, I have always been baffled why an AI will popup, and offer me Tech A for Tech B. I refuse, but then as a TEST, see what it will give me for Tech B when I ask. Usually it wont want to trade for it at all, though the odd time it will suddenly give me 10x as much. It's never consistant.

I think on time, the AI wanted to give me a huge sum of gold and techs for a single tech, I said no. Then on my turn I couldn't even Give the damn tech away to him. What's going on here?

I also find fiddling around gives me much better deals when you TWEAK IT RIGHT, but as mentioned, the interface is forcing the player to do a tedious processes for something that should be automatic. Again.. bad interface design. I had been told it was fixed, but at lest it's not in 3.13.

Ohhh and who here honestly think's Firaxis was right to REMOVE the glance-tab? That was one of the worst interface decisions I have seen yet.

 

[Dirk1302]

Also agree with Kazapp, without Bhruic patch it's a real pain in BTS, better now but indeed getting the best deal with one click and automatic renegotiation would be great. I do have Glance btw, it's in the patch and also in Bugmod, very important that screen.

 

[Delan]

How the heck did you get that much gpt out of the AI? I'm on Noble too and I've never seen an AI with more than 6gpt available (unless you meant 15gpt out of all the AI civs combined).

Speaking of resource trading tips, I have something to add. Grains for meat is a good trade - you get +2 (granary), the AI only gets +1, but they place the same value on both.

You have to keep looking at the trade advisor screen. Income grows all the time, and I've seen an AI with disposable income well above 10 many times. However, you can trade for this extra gold by either offering additional resources, or restructuring old trades. For example, suppose you're trading a cow for 6 gold, and the trade advisor shows that the AI now has 8 more income gold to trade. You can cancel the original trade and then offer the cow again, this time requesting 14 gold for it. The AI will almost always comply. You might take a slight relations hit because you cancelled the first trade, but that hasn't really mattered to me in my games.

As a previous poster has said, you can gain enough extra gold per turn to still have positive income even though you're running a deficit based on your own income, or use the extra gold to finance upgrades.

 

[Bleys]

Bhruics patch doesnt fix everything thats wrong with the game, but it certainly covers enough "big" issues to make it worth it, and the AI trade exploit is one of them.

AIs will still actually trade for resources that they have in their cultural borders, because they are kind of stupid about giving away their only source of things. In one recent game I made a trade to Alex, giving him Iron for 2 good resources (corn and wine, I think), and then the very next turn, I traded him Iron again for 16 gpt, and he even had Iron in one of his cities. I use Bhruics Patch, so I wanted to see what was going on, the AI is NOT supposed to trade for resources it has, and it turned out that he had traded his own Iron away to one AI, and then traded the first Iron I traded him to another AI.

I dont know if there is an unexploitable solution, but as a player, I know I am "hard coded" to not trade away my only source of important resources. I think the AIs should be like that as well, coded to NEVER trade away their only supply of any resource unless they are vassals and have too.

 

[Clam Spammer]

You have to keep looking at the trade advisor screen. Income grows all the time, and I've seen an AI with disposable income well above 10 many times. However, you can trade for this extra gold by either offering additional resources, or restructuring old trades. For example, suppose you're trading a cow for 6 gold, and the trade advisor shows that the AI now has 8 more income gold to trade. You can cancel the original trade and then offer the cow again, this time requesting 14 gold for it. The AI will almost always comply. You might take a slight relations hit because you cancelled the first trade, but that hasn't really mattered to me in my games.

I know what I should be doing, but this situation never arises. I check the trade advisor regularly throughout my games (every 5 turns or so) looking for this sort of opportunity, but it just never comes. If I am trading with an AI for 5 or 6 gpt, then they will have only 1 or 2 gpt available for the rest of the game, no matter how long I wait, and like I said before no more than 5-6 if I'm not trading with them. I guess the AI in my game is just poor... we're on the same difficulty though so that doesn't explain it.

 

[JBossch]

You have to keep looking at the trade advisor screen. Income grows all the time, and I've seen an AI with disposable income well above 10 many times. However, you can trade for this extra gold by either offering additional resources, or restructuring old trades. For example, suppose you're trading a cow for 6 gold, and the trade advisor shows that the AI now has 8 more income gold to trade. You can cancel the original trade and then offer the cow again, this time requesting 14 gold for it. The AI will almost always comply. You might take a slight relations hit because you cancelled the first trade, but that hasn't really mattered to me in my games.

This is true but beware: sometimes it is a trap. From time to time you will cancel the deal and go to renegotiate only to see 0 gold available. I think there must be other commitments that aren't showing up or interrelated deals that upset the AI's GPT.

I think the AIs should be like that as well, coded to NEVER trade away their only supply of any resource unless they are vassals and have too.

Pretty sure this has always been the case.

 

[siggboy]

I'm with Obsolete and others: AI behaviour is very erratic when it comes to trades, and the standard user interface is not transparent at all (A LOT of screen flipping you have to do, possibly even taking notes, to get the best deals -- only to find that you would actually need to do this every time you can cancel a current deal just to renegotiate to something better).

My advice is to play with BUG Mod (or HOF Mod, at least) because they enhance the diplomatic windows for tech and resource trades in a way that they actually become useful (showing the gold per turn which is available, among other things).

 

[JTMacc99]

I actually have come to like the fact that the AI will offer you a deal that, if you attempt to negotiate, might no longer be on the table.

It's a little bit of a gamble to reject the first offer, especially when it comes knocking with something like sheep for furs. You might really need sheep to help with some health issues, and you've got 3 extra beavers, but you also think that happy is worth more than healthy so you'd like to get a few gold out of the deal as well. When you ask the AI if he or she would care to negotiate, there is a real chance that you will insult them and they will no longer be willing to make the original deal. Just like a real person parting with a possession, the AI doesn't always act rationally.

At this point, I'm much more inclined to take the sheep for furs type deals and will just try to grab some extra cash from them by selling them a cow or something like that as part of a separate deal. Plus, once they get a taste for beef, I can always go back and renegotiate the deal for more GPT if I pay attention to how much it has to offer.

 

[Nishdog]

Maybe there should be a no resource brokering agreement similar to the no tech brokering option. If you trade iron to your buddy, he shouldn't be allowed to turn around and trade it to your enemy who then turns around and builds a swarm of swords to send your way!

 

[Gliese 581]

The BUG mod will tell you f.e. "X has 3 gold available for trade". You can set the value at which you want to be notified. Then you just keep renegotiating deals, you should typically get at least 10-15 gold per resource in the rennaisance and more later on.
I agree it's a bit tedious micro, it could have been handled automatically. There's also the situation that obsolete has mentioned previously where you see an AI has more gpt for trade and you cancel a deal where you got 10gpt for a resource to renegotiate it.. suddenly they have nothing at all to trade you.. wtf?

Also while we're discussing good trade policies vs the AI, health resources can usually be traded away for gold early since you're limited by happiness, even if you only have one. "Lease it" then cancel the deal later if you need the health back.

 

[Bleys]

Maybe there should be a no resource brokering agreement similar to the no tech brokering option. If you trade iron to your buddy, he shouldn't be allowed to turn around and trade it to your enemy who then turns around and builds a swarm of swords to send your way!

I think this is exactly what happened in the game I referred to in my other post, ty, it was the PYL Backstabber game, and I was playing Cathy, and Alex was trading his own Iron to one of the other backstabbers!

 

[vale]

Lots of things could be happening here with the cancellation:
1. City could become unhealthy as a result and juggle tiles to +food to avoid starvation, losing commerce.
2. City could become unhappy as a result and lose a commerce tile.
3. Civ might notice that it can raise its slider and do so, losing its GPT surplus.
It is not at all unreasonable that those things would happen instantly in response to your cancellation before you renegotiate.

 

[Gliese 581]

Lots of things could be happening here with the cancellation:
1. City could become unhealthy as a result and juggle tiles to +food to avoid starvation, losing commerce.
2. City could become unhappy as a result and lose a commerce tile.
3. Civ might notice that it can raise its slider and do so, losing its GPT surplus.
It is not at all unreasonable that those things would happen instantly in response to your cancellation before you renegotiate.

I think it is. Why should the AI get turns during my turn? They should not be immediately affected. They should have the right to say no to the deal of course but the money should be unchanged until it's their turn.
They certainly shouldn't be able to change their slider.

 

[Ormur]

It happens from time to time that their gold drops to zero when you renegotiate but more often than not they are again willing to trade away a similar amount of gold after a few turns.