Trade actually seems more interesting now. Need more gaming time but im getting decent offers for my luxuries now. Seems like a small bump for my strategic resources as well. However the ai seems to only be buying and selling what they actually need. So seems to be working as intended.
I feel like the revamping of luxury trading with AI is going to royally screw over any player who wants to try the Netherlands, especially the part where they won’t trade for goods they don’t “want”.
For goods they don’t want, the AI should at least offer a reduced gold amount if they’ve got decent gold per turn. Making them hold back for the sake of potential WLTKD chances doesn’t make much sense unless they’re a civ that has a unique bonus from it like Brazil or China.
I would disagree with the first idea. It might have been interesting in theory but in reality it has turned into a bit of a drag. A very unfunny one. While it might make some kind of sense nothing about it is good when it comes to actually playing compared to previously. I would say that the new trade valuation is just to annoying to play with really. If it solved something or made it better for the AI it made it infinitly worse and more micromanagement for the player.
The UI (on the right side with all the faces and their various needs or haves) is now completely useless and/or broken for the player as it doesn't show what the AI is willing to sell or want to buy anymore. It shows what they have and what they can buy not what they want to buy. So you have to go into each and every civ. Click each and every item one by one to see if they want to buy that thing or if that is "impossible" or not. You can't really mass-click on all your luxuries as one "bad" item makes the deal impossible. I guess you could offer everything and click off one item at a time but then that doesn't really help or tell you much of anything either unless they want to buy everything, which they most likely won't.
That task alone takes an incredible amount of time per turn to check. You are basically better of just ignoring the entire aspect of the game. Just trade when the AI wants to trade and makes an offer to you. The other part is now basically dead or pointless as far as I am concerned. That is if the AI will even accept the trades even when it suggests it themselves since apparently a good chunk of those trades comes out as Impossible to or they offer like 0 or 1 gold for them. There have been some utterly rare exceptions to this but nothing you can actually live on trade wise. This so far is mainly based on the first 1/3 of total_turns allowed (so end of medieval era or so). Perhaps it works out in the end but in the first third of the game this sucks hard.
I would think that Goddess of Festivals is probably next to pointless as a Pantheon at the moment.
I have not tried to play as the Netherlands yet but with them in game they seem to bork themselves hard since their whole thing is importing luxuries. Which they apparently don't. They should be living the dream now then with all the duplicates they could get. But they don't from what I can tell. Or at least they don't want to buy my duplicates. Money doesn't appear to be an issue for them as they are making decent GPT. I assume other similar luxury and trade abilities are similarly borked. Even tho many of them depend on traderoutes instead of specific items, so they are probably saved in that regard.
Civs that spawn their own unique luxuries (Brazil, Inca, Indo ...) are just creating stockpiles of their goods from what I can tell. In my current game Indonesia is sitting on 3+ of cloves, pepper, nutmeg and just won't trade them to anyone it seems. That is to say nobody wants to buy them since they don't need them. Similar sitation with the Inca and Brazil.
What this whole change sort of misses in some regard is that there is a difference between NEED and WANT. Consumers or countries in some regard might not NEED things to live or whatever. But whole industries are there to create and supply the WANT. Even things people clearly don't need. So to cut this whole thing of to just cater to NEED at a minimum or minimal level seems quite silly really. It's not that you should over do it and just buy buy buy everything there is, that has always been a bad strategy in the game -- as this sort of prevents city-state quests from popping up where they want you to connect various resources. So in that regard you want to not buy things or getting rid of all your stratresources just so the quest can pop up. That aspect is now also not really working.