Discussion: Should AI trade-making focus more on reciprocity?

[LifeOfBrian]

What I mean by the title is whether the AI should be "taught" to try to include what it wants from you (besides gold) when giving you something you want (besides gold). (Disclaimer: I don't know how hard it would be to code this.)

For example, let's say I want a copy of Cocoa from Siam and I have Copper to spare. If I offered Copper, Siam would want to buy it. In fact it approached me several times in the last few turns wanting to buy it, but I didn't want to sell (so as to not help Siam trigger WLTKD and CS quests and to not help with their (un)happiness). Then, I approach Siam to buy Cocoa, offering 6gpt. Currently, Siam would happily accept. What I want to discuss is whether the AI should "know" to demand Copper in return for Cocoa. I imagine the human player would be miffed if it played with another human player and that player wouldn't want to trade their excess Copper for my Cocoa, but would only want to pay some gold per turn for my Cocoa. So should the AI be more human-like in this regard?

The AI is usually swimming in lots of gold, especially on higher difficulties and from mid-game onward. If Siam is making over 300gpt, then I imagine getting a luxury and all the non-gold benefits from that is much more important for Siam than another paltry 6gpt. This applies for luxury resources, strategic resources, embassies, open borders, trade votes, peace/war declarations with 3rd parties.

Thanks for your replies!

 

[Recursive]

(Disclaimer: I don't know how hard it would be to code this.)

Very hard. But it's something I'd like to do one day.

 

[LifeOfBrian]

Thanks for the reply!

 

[Stalker0]

That would be great, though I’d like as a first step for the AI to even offer me proper gold. Right now when I press the “what do you want from this” button it’s most of the time not able to give me a gold equivalent value, let alone anything more complex

 

[tommytoxen]

Agreed totally. It annoys me a little when a civ asks me for a resource/luxury but offers a ridiculously low amount of gold, so I counter instead for luxury4luxury(/resource) but they'll be all like "impossible!". what?? you want my resource a lot more than i want your luxury bro, i'm trying to do you a favour here

besides if i wanted his luxury so much that i was willing to pay for it he'd just find my troops invading his border to take it by force.