City Roulette

[Duraska]

Okay, I was just screwing around with the AI and I think I might have stumbled upon something weird. I was playing as England on Prince difficulty.

This is early on in the game, still BC / Classic Era.

I founded a new city next to one of Catherine's cities, and I was bored so I sent over troops and took her nearest city (we shared borders). I annexed it, and decided to try selling it to another civ. Sure enough Bismark was up for buying it with all his available gold. Catherine also came to me and offered a different city to me as part of a peace deal. I sold this additional city to the Ottoman's (it was far away from my empire).

So then I was thinking... what if I would turn around, declare war on Bismark and take the (originally) Russian city back (that I just sold him). Sure, we'd be at war, but I bet he'd give me a ton of stuff for peace pretty soon afterwards. I could sell that city to another civ and then rinse and repeat, right? Could this be a way to make tons of gold while taking advantage of the AI decision-making?

I feel like the AI is a bit screwy. Maybe it's just because I'm playing on Prince? ARe they more strategically-minded on higher difficulties??

 

[Syiss_]

I dont know when this situation occured, but a recent patch apparently fixed some issues with AI's valuation of cities. I also wouldn't expect such an exploitable mechanic to be available for long if this is still happening after the patch. Also consider that continually declaring war on people seems to have a pretty negative effect on how the other AI's view you, so you may eventually just end up pissing everyone off to the point where you cant trade and everyone wants to fight you.

 

[Duraska]

I feel like the AI almost always ends up getting irrationally pissed at you anyway...

But ok. Here's a different idea. Build a bunch of settlers, and found a bunch of cities all across the map in the worst possible spots you can find. Then sell these cities to the other AI Civs. You get their gold, they get worthless cities to pay maintenance on and gain unhappiness from (assuming the AI has to deal with happiness).

Also if you settled two cities very close together and sold them to two rival Civs, could you spark a war between them?? (Due to their (now) close borders)

 

[Kaxeon]

But ok. Here's a different idea. Build a bunch of settlers, and found a bunch of cities all across the map in the worst possible spots you can find. Then sell these cities to the other AI Civs. You get their gold, they get worthless cities to pay maintenance on and gain unhappiness from (assuming the AI has to deal with happiness).

This kind of stuff might work, but it just isn't satisfying to win the game that way.

 

[Syiss_]

Those tactics are pretty regularly used in deity games in Civ IV actually (the ones that I've followed anyways). You generally just gift the city to the AI rather than sell it, but it accomplishes the goal of getting brownie points with the AI, giving them extra maintenance and a worthless city, and if you can pull it off, creating tension by giving two AI's close borders (in Civ IV, how close civs are to each other is a significant factor in determining who the AI will declare on).