Getting cities in peace negotiations

[Kulture]

A strange thing happened in a game I just played. I had just about beat the Germans into submission when they sued for peace. SO I tried to get as many cities from them as possible. They would let me take one city, but when I tried asking for another they said no. I added some cash to the negotiation and got the message 'they would never accept such a deal' from my advisor. So I backed off on the cities I was asking for - and the message remained 'they would never accept such a deal'.

I thought - that's strange they were happy to accept it before when I wasn't offering cash.

It turns out that they would accept a peace treaty and give me one of their cities, but they wouldn't accept the same offer if I added cash to my offer to them. Why, sure that's a better deal for them? Is this a bug in the new patch? I don't seem to remember this being a problem in earlier versions of CivIII.

 

[Pembroke]

Not a bug. It's a poor solution to a real problem.

Originally you could trade cities in civ3. However, it allowed a loophole: sell the city next to your capital for stuff, then wait the city to culture-flip back to you thus getting the stuff for nothing.

Rather than code in some logic to identify cities that would soon flip back Firaxis just disallowed the trading of cities entirely.

Now cities can only change ownership as "gifts". You can extort them and you can give them away for free, but you can't trade them.

It does create some illogical, and sometimes amusing AI behavior in the trade window. Look around for various threads.