Is this a bug ?

[Drakan]

C3C V1.22 Spanish:


I was playing with the Dutch and I was lacking oil in my continent.

I saw that the almighty Sumerians had two oil but didn't have Refining as a tech. So I hit the F4 key and gifted them Refining so they could trade with me one of their oil.

Well, although I had 3.000 gold, they wouldn't trade with me their spare strategical resource. So anyway i decided to take the chance and offer them 2.000 gold lump sum in return. My foreign advisor told me it was acceptable. i was happy. So I started the typical haggling.

After ten offers, I lowered to 1 (one) gold in return for their oil and my advisor told me it was acceptable for them.

So the next twenty turns I got oil from the massive sumerian empire for a meagre ... one gold !! take that Trump !!

Has anyone noticed this bug before ? I've been playing this game for years and that's never happened to me before. Is it known ?

 

[Bartleby]

You can see oil once you have refining, but you can't use it until you have combustion. So until the Sumerians discover combustion, the oil is worthless to them.

 

[Drakan]

Ahhhh !! I thought it was a bug. Yeop, they didn't know combustion. Thanks for the quick reply Bartleby.

 

[Ginger_Ale]

You can actually demand the oil, and probably no matter how small your empire is, you can get it for free (not that 1 gold is a huge investment anyway). Since the AI has no use for it at Refining, it treats it as a useless resource, one that doesn't do anything, so it gives it away - until it gets Refining Combustion and charges thousands of gold for it ...

edit: Are you stalking me and my posts Tomoyo? Thanks, nice catch.

 

[Tomoyo]

until it gets Refining and charges thousands of gold for it ...

Methinks they can't sell oil until they get Refining...

 

[thetrooper]

The same thing happened to me recently - 1 gpt for oil (from the Koreans). I thought that the offer was to honour our good relationship.

Anyway - when they learned Combustion the deal was raised to 30 gpt (which is pretty good too)

 

[Drakan]

Man, I had no idea about this neat trick. But then I nearly always had oil in my territory so there was little need to pull off this one. Thanks lads.

 

[Doc Tsiolkovski]

Actually, it doesn't matter if Sumeria has Combustion - what really matters is you having a use for Oil!
The fact they won't sell it if you ask is that it is essentially worthless; and for that, the AI seems to lack the understanding. Note their answer if you ask is the 'not interested in such a deal' phrase, and tfor this one time, they are just too honorable .

 

[Drakan]

Well, I still haven't figured out combustion either, but I wanted to reserve that oil source for when it became useful to me. There's only one oil in my continent and we're fours civs fighting over it. Whereas the sumerians are on a huge continent all to themselves (after killing off two civs) and sitting on two oil. It's a preemptive measure