Perpetuum Mobile - how to get energy for free

[alpaca]

Another poster mentioned this in a thread about favors, but I thought I'd put this "great" exploit out here, which might make it more likely to be seen by the devs.

The principle is simple: the AI will give you a favor for 3 ept (energy per turn). You can then sell it that same favor back for 100 energy flat...

So not only have you just gotten a nice loan and drained the AI of energy they might otherwise have spent on useful stuff, but you also pay negative interest for it as you only have to repay 90 energy. The only downside is that it only works for 3 ept for 1 favor, not 6 for 2 or any such thing.

Buy nice stuff for it of do whatever you want, it doesn't matter as you can always get more money. The printing press even becomes better as difficulty goes up.

Declare war to renege on the deal for extra profits if you don't need them as a trade route target and it's worth your while.

 

[Tomice]

Is there a bug report already? Because this clearly is one.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Is there a bug report already? Because this clearly is one.

I'm not sure bug is quite the right word, but it clearly needs to be fixed. It's a major hole in AI play.

 

[Martin Alvito]

It gets worse.

A neutral AI will sell 1 GPT for 33 gold, or 3 for 99. What this means is that you could (tediously) drain every neutral AI of its coffers down to < 100 gold, then repeat ad nauseum, without even having to declare war.

There's several things wrong here. First of all, the devs didn't pay attention in the intro economics class on the day when they discussed discounting. The AI doesn't discount the present value of GPT heavily enough to account for either the present utility of gold or the risk of a DoW, and it's completely ridiculous that it demands to get paid in order to borrow money. That's not a new problem; it bewildered me in CiV too.

Second of all, having the ability to soak the AIs for every copper with zero consequences (however tedious) must be fixed.

Third, the AI can't repay favors more efficiently than it lends. It's probably best if favors cannot be cashed out in any way, and are strictly useful for diplo demands that cannot be purchased with cash (such as 'stop settling' rather than 'DoW this guy for me'). If there's a way to launder money through the favor system and profit in the process, we will find it.

 

[alpaca]

Is there a bug report already? Because this clearly is one.

I don't know if "bug" is really the right description, more like a glaring misadjustment in the AI evaluation algorithms. As Martin Alvito wrote, it should value lump sum money much more than it does, but this has been an issue since Civ5. You could always get more lump sum for your resources than the integrated sum of the gpt, and the same is true for BE. This favor thing really pushes the envelope but it's not qualitatively new.

 

[Kanasuke]

The AI in this game is too stupid, and the multiplayer mode in this game is not that good.