[1.0.0.328] AI trade valuation: it's far cheaper to buy strategic resources one at a time

[Arms Longfellow]

I have discovered that if you ask for say, 10 pieces of a strategic resource from an AI, they will demand an outrageous price for them; thousands of gold. However, you can get around this by simply buying only 1 piece of the strategic resource for a reasonable price, and then repeating this 10 times, resulting in thousands of gold in savings.

I have attached a save file just in case you want to verify what I've shown in these screenshots, but I think it's easy enough to test this for yourself in any of your own games by simply observing the difference in cost between asking for a lot of strategic resources at once vs buying them one at a time.

 

[Pfeffersack]

Yes, I stumbled over that as well and posted it here:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/1-0-0-328-two-1-piece-trading-exploits-still-present.646931/

Really hoping that this gets fixed, because it basically kills the strategy of acquiring strategic ressources you don't have by trading. Sure you can get round it as a human player by going through the necessary clickfest, but I assume it basically kills any inter-AI-trades, which probly dooms any AI with few own strategic ressources even more.

 

[Arms Longfellow]

Ah man. I even checked the threads on the past couple pages to see if this was already posted, but I guess I didn't look hard enough.

In any event, I don't agree that this is an "exploit" because I think that the one-at-a-time price is, in fact, the intended price by the devs (it seems fair, unlike the 10,000+ gold they demand if you ask for 20 at a time). It's also roughly the price that the AI will buy resources off the player. However, you're right that it might handicap the AI by preventing them from trading strategic resources with each other because the seller will be asking for way too much.