Results from 10 minutes of testing the new trade AI
I went to an AI to see how they value my oil in the hotfixed game. I offered various amounts of oil and asked what Lautaro was willing to give in return.
- At first he had 2 oil. He was willing to pay an increasing amount of gold for additional oil, up until my offer reached 11 oil, for which he was willing to pay 9 GPT and 16 gold.
- Past that point, he was not willing to pay a single extra gold for any amount of oil
- I took the deal, then went back to trade for more
- Now the maximum amount of oil he wanted to pay for was 8 oil, for which he paid 7 GPT and 4 gold
- After taking that deal I returned to him again. He was now willing to pay 9 GPT and 16 gold for 11 oil again.
- This repeats for any amount of future deals.
- It's a hard limit, the AI pays an equal amount more for each additional iron until that limit is reached, then it pays nothing more
Conclusion: This is a very poor, hardcoded stopgap fix, better than nothing but still broken. Once you identify the number of resources the AI wants to pay for, you can just keep trading that amount over and over. It's the same exploit from before the first patch really, where you could trade 1 resource unit at a time and get better returns. It adds some really obnoxious micromanagement to the trading, because if you don't bother identifying the amount of resources the AI will pay for, you are basically giving them any additional resources for free. So you have to ask them about the amounts one by one, going into the submenu to edit the number of resources and removing the gold from the AI's side of the table for every time you ask.
I really hope Firaxis will take a more thorough look at the trade AI and the trade screen UI for the next patch. There are simple ways to go about fixing this, like being able to drag a slider under the iron icon to increase or decrease the amount, with a visual indicator of the point where the AI doesn't want more of it, instead of the clunky interface we have now. And the AI needs to know better what it wants, not just on a trade-by-trade basis, so you can't exploit it by making the same deal over and over.
Edit: Uranium can be sold to most of the AIs at 11 GPT and 6 gold for 3 uranium. Again, they won't pay more than that for any amount, but they will take this deal over and over as many times as you want. However, it seems AIs that are behind in tech and can't use uranium won't pay more than 1 gold for any amount of it.
11 GPT and 6 gold is also the exact amount all the AIs are willing to pay for a luxury, if they want one. If they don't want it, they only pay 1 gold. However, by increasing the amount of luxuries you trade them until a threshold is reached, they become willing to pay... 11 GPT and 6 gold for all of them. If you add more luxuries to the table, they will not pay any extra gold until another threshold is reached, at which point they double their offer. An example:
1 luxury: 1 gold
2 luxuries: 11 GPT and 6 gold
3 luxuries: 11 GPT and 6 gold
4 luxuries: 22 GPT and 12 gold
5 luxuries: 22 GPT and 12 gold
6 luxuries: 34 GPT and 1 gold
Again, this code is clearly an improvement over the patch before the hotfix, as none of the deals I can get are outrageously good at this late stage in the game, but it's very much a bandaid with some rigid rules that the player has to work around in order to not waste gold. Instead of a more nuanced, granular system of evaluation, the AI seems to run on picking from pre-defined values with clear thresholds and limits that the player has to find via testing.
