Start a world war and make tons of gold from it. Exploit?

[MykC]

So, I started doing this in response to when you kinda know a couple AI civs are about to declare war on you (you know they line up all their troops on your borders).

Initially, I would diplo the target AI, trade all my resources (luxury and strategic) for as much gold as I can get. Then declare war on them, then, move on to the next target AI. I was getting a decent amount of gold normally, enough to rush buy a few extra units.

Then I decided to take it the next level, if I was getting all their gold I would see who they would go to war with and choose the ones I could afford that would be largest threat to them (point value and proximity).

And finally, when I decided to use my GPT to maximize their suffering. This was best done when I was in a golden age, and even more so if I set the cities I controlled to gold focus. By trading all my GPT I was able to get significantly more out the AI (gold/wars).

So, I was doing this with every AI civ regardless of whether they were hostile or not. I was able to generate a large amount of gold and use that gold to purchase a large amount of units for the defense. What would happen pretty much every time is that most of the AI wouldn't engage my borders for very long or at all (even the ones within proximity). In 10 or so turns pretty much everyone would offer a peace treaty and some would even surrender gold to me as well (even though I had not entered their borders).

I would accept peace with everyone unless it was someone I wanted to take land from at the time.

Somethings that I noticed:

I believe this caused tensions to rise between other AI civs permanently. There was time where an AI civ would only want open borders to declare war on another CIV.

The AI civs peace offerings seemed dependent on your army value (see the diplo screen). If you had no army they wouldn't offer peace or ask for stuff from you, if you had a large army value they would at the very least offer straight peace.

Some AIs are very difficult to get to declare war like Ghandi.

Some AIs will not declare war on a given CIV for any amount of money that one could possible hope to have (500GPT?)

AI civs really value their cities, I think on the few occassion I tried, (and I stopped cause it wasn;t worth the effort). To get a 5 pop citiy that had no resources and was in quite possibly the most horrible spot I had to trade like 300GPT for. They when I tried to sell to another AI civ I think they most I got for it was like the equivalent of 5 like GPT.

In the I actually use diplo to have AI civs declare war on each other to protect myself (at I think it helps) without declaring war right back at them (IE I can't afford to be in any war period).

Just wanted to share some of the shadyness that I've used to get through some games. I does show the brokenness of GPT and resources. I can only assume this is how the devs intended the game to be played otherwise they should simply lock the gpt and resouces until times up.

 

[Martin Alvito]

There are two basic problems:

1) The AI doesn't understand the commitment problems involved in selling something now for something later. Luxuries, resources and GPT are inherently "something later" because your provision of these goods is conditional. You commit to a fixed time frame but the deal cancels in the event of war. By contrast, a lump sum of and a declaration of war are "something now" that cannot be undone at a later time if the other player fails to fulfill the contract.

2) The AI's judgments regarding the relative value of various goods and services are dubious at best. It still overpays for luxuries because players screamed bloody murder when it stopped doing so. It will overpay for cities even after that update, it does not charge enough for declarations of war, and it will take stupid risks on loans when it doesn't possess sufficient force to deter you from reneging.

The simplest solution is to make deals persist even in the event of war, although that isn't terribly realistic.

 

[MykC]

Since it is a specific issue they should just get the AI to do the following...

The player declared war on me. Was there any trades... were these trades of the resource, GPT nature... how many turns before the declaration of war.... should I place a do not trust on trades?

Something like that. I mean it fairly simple, if you burn the first time that fine, but it should not happen a second time.

I mean, resource trading, selling cities, getting AIs to go to war, RA agreements, stealing workers are all questionable tactics but most or all of them seem required to perform on the immortal/deity level.

The AI get such as large advantage in these levels to compensate for their stupidity that I can only assume that we are to take advantage of their stupidity while they take advantage of their bonuses.

Personally, I would like to see their advantages reduced and have the "shady" play fixed.

 

[builer680]

The simplest solution is to make deals persist even in the event of war, although that isn't terribly realistic.

The simplest solution is the one Civ 4 had. "Per turn" items could only be traded for other "Per turn" items. Same with "Lump Sum" items.

That way you simply couldn't exploit the AI for this specific purpose.

 

[neilkaz]

I mean, resource trading, selling cities, getting AIs to go to war, RA agreements, stealing workers are all questionable tactics but most or all of them seem required to perform on the immortal/deity level.

The AI get such as large advantage in these levels to compensate for their stupidity that I can only assume that we are to take advantage of their stupidity while they take advantage of their bonuses.

Personally, I would like to see their advantages reduced and have the "shady" play fixed.

Agreed and I'd also like to see less shady play and somewhat lower advantages for Immortal/Deity.

For me, I find it too cheesy make a deal with the AI where they give me cash now and I have to repay them over 30 turns (either gold or lux or res) and then I DOW them. However, if they are dumb enough to take this deal and then DOW me and lose what I am providing then that's their fault. That being said, it may be necessary to do anything and everything within the game to win on Immortal and likely is on Deity.

Re: worker stealing..I am talking about taking them from AI civs. I think you can only get one from a CS anyhow and that the diplo issues are rarely worth it in SP play.

 

[Phrederick]

The simplest solution is the one Civ 4 had. "Per turn" items could only be traded for other "Per turn" items. Same with "Lump Sum" items.

That way you simply couldn't exploit the AI for this specific purpose.

I'd prefer the Civ3 (or was it Civ4 vanilla?) model, with a slight twist. You can trade per turn items for lump sum items, but if the deal gets broken off for any reason (war, you lose the resource, etc), no one will give you lump sum for per turn. The twist would be that you could "make it up" to the aggrieved civilization, by refunding whatever they're owed, perhaps plus a penalty. That way, if it's not your fault (you lose the city that has the resource you're trading), you don't get penalized unfairly.

 

[travlake]

How does this sound:

1) Per turn deals automatically restart if a peace deal is ever signed. When evaluating a peace deal, AI considers a "neutral deal" one that includes the old per turn deals. if it wants to offer a favorable deal to the player, it can forgive the previous per turn deals.

2) AI tracks your reputation for declaring war while owing per turn deals to people. If your reputation sucks they won't sign lump sum for per turn deals.

I don't like the civ iv solution because I missed the Alpha Centauri loans.

 

[Pouakai]

I had several extra luxuries when playing on Earth (I Was only one on North America, two in South America and rest in Old World) and got everyone to declare war on everyone by trading the extras away.

 

[rtfischbeck]

I wouldn't be opposed to deal continuing during war. However, if we can get diplo working consistently, then perhaps the best fix would be a relation hit to other civs. Make the penalty similar to the one for lying about massing troops, which seems to really hurt in terms of peace/luxury sales.

 

[EndoConvert]

There are two basic problems:

1) The AI doesn't understand the commitment problems involved in selling something now for something later. Luxuries, resources and GPT are inherently "something later" because your provision of these goods is conditional. You commit to a fixed time frame but the deal cancels in the event of war. By contrast, a lump sum of and a declaration of war are "something now" that cannot be undone at a later time if the other player fails to fulfill the contract.

2) The AI's judgments regarding the relative value of various goods and services are dubious at best. It still overpays for luxuries because players screamed bloody murder when it stopped doing so. It will overpay for cities even after that update, it does not charge enough for declarations of war, and it will take stupid risks on loans when it doesn't possess sufficient force to deter you from reneging.

The simplest solution is to make deals persist even in the event of war, although that isn't terribly realistic.

Making deals persist in war is completely unrealistic, and also unnecessary when there's an equally simple and much more realistic solution: have the AI make a "present value" adjustment. Present value is a term used in finance; it is the value of a future payment at the present time, when taking risk into account. Banks set interest rates for loans based on present value calculations. It would be quite easy to code; just put in a multiplier, tied to such factors as relative military strength and whether you are trustworthy (whether you have broken deals in the past), that downgrades the AI's determination of the value of future payments.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Making deals persist in war is completely unrealistic, and also unnecessary when there's an equally simple and much more realistic solution: have the AI make a "present value" adjustment. Present value is a term used in finance; it is the value of a future payment at the present time, when taking risk into account. Banks set interest rates for loans based on present value calculations. It would be quite easy to code; just put in a multiplier, tied to such factors as relative military strength and whether you are trustworthy (whether you have broken deals in the past), that downgrades the AI's determination of the value of future payments.

PV calculations by the AI are invariably going to be broken by players timing out their abuses or going too far the other way (initial PV is too low - the AI simply doesn't trust anybody else for these deals...which would functionally eliminate them and go back to the old model of "per turn only for per turn").

I am all for closing holes like this, because they are 1) tedious and 2) encourage/need higher bonuses for the AI to compensate, which locks high level players into the tedium. However, using these abuses in the game's current form is anything but an exploit - firaxis lobs these things at us constantly and the only logical conclusions possible for their behavior is that they either expect us to behave in a gamey fashion by design or they simply don't care. Take your pick on those .