This could be a newbie question or a bts question, I figured it fit best here. I just bought BTS I decided to take a archipelago map to try to test out the new features. They kept killing me on pangea.
The AI can be quite aggressive when you don't have a large enough army. Take a look at the power graph (F9 screen) to see how strong you are compared to your neighbours.
So anyway, how much do you have to spy on somebody before you can steal a tech?
That depends on the various spying bonuses and penalties you enjoy with that AI civilisation. The cost for stealing the technology is not the same in each city. However, the cost is directly related to the research cost of the technology. So a technology costing 5000 research points to research will cost something close to 5000 espionage points to steal. You can get that many points by building a lot of espionage buildings and running a high espionage slider. Instead of researching, you're spying.
If you heavily invest in espionage and try to get many espionage bonuses, then you can get a really good espionage bonus and spying can be cheaper than researching.
If you want to know a lot about the details of spying, then you should read
this strategy article/discussion. There are several interesting posts in that thread. Some of the posts might be a bit technical.
but my real question is how exactly do corporations work? I think I met all the requirements but my GE still won't build his HQ. What am I still missing? I have gold and railroad in the building I want to build it in. does it count as a national wonder or something?
There are several requirements to found a corporation headquarters
-You need to have the enabling technology
-You need to have the corporation technology
-You need the appropriate great person, each great person needs a different great person
-You need to run the appropriate civic. That means, you don't use the State Property civic
-There is a bug in BTS 3.13 which disallows founding corporation headquarters when using the mercantalism civic. Use the unofficial patch to fix this.
-You can't found two conflicting corporations in the same city. Some corporations need some of the same resources to function. Such corporations cannot exist in the same city.
There can be said a lot more about corporations than the way to found them. If you have questions about other aspects of their functionalities, then just ask.
edit* and how the heck to you keep them from backdooring you all the time and trade embargoing you? they always want like a iron, a copper and a horse plus 17 gold per turn for like rice or something. and if I do make a trade then 10 turns later they always cancel.
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There is a bug in BTS 3.13 where the AI is willing to trade for resources it already has. This is useful once the AI has a corporation that uses these resources, but it is already willing to trade for such resources even when there is no reasonable gain for the AI and corporations are not available yet. The iron + copper + 17 gold per turn deal is quite useless for them if they already have iron and copper themselves.
You should install
Bhruic's unofficial patch for BTS 3.13. It fixes this strange behaviour for the AI.
By the way, I didn't actually check out your gamesave, so I could be mistaken.
![[party]](/images/smilies/partytime.gif "Party [party]")
and
in three cities for a culture win:
