Stealing money from the AI (Deity)

[Martin Alvito]

This strategy exploits the huge GPT bonuses and early aggression of the AI on the Deity level for early profit.

- Figure out which civ is going to DOW. The closest one is invariably going to declare first if you have a soft military. Distant civs won't attack you. They're not willing to drive an army all the way across the continent if they can't retreat to heal it.
- Leverage yourself to the hilt with the threatening civ. Take out a loan that clears out your GPT surplus. Then sell it luxuries. You sell the GPT first so that it refills its coffers faster, enabling you to dump as many luxuries as possible.
- Two good things are going to happen:

a) You buy 10 or 20 turns of peace to develop unmolested and prepare, as the cost of canceling the deals will deter the DOW. If you put an advance unit between you and the AI's territory to scout, you'll know when it's coming. Usually this process starts on a turn divisible by 10 (when the AI thinks for a while between turns). Run for a city or a rough tile near a city when you see the invasion force, and position the rest of your skeleton military to resist.

b) When it declares, all your deals with that civ are canceled. If you are weak enough, you will typically profit on the GPT deal. Worst case scenario is a slight net gold drain in exchange for an early purchase (Influence, Worker) you would not otherwise have had. You will always profit on any luxury deal. Either it's now making your citizens happy, or you can resell it to an AI for more cash.

- I haven't yet figured out what the threshold is for deterring an AI entirely. I've occasionally stalled it for over 20 turns when I've loaded it down heavily with goodies. I intend to keep working at inducting this from the data.
- I've also tried forcing perpetual peace by using staggered small GPT deals, but this does not seem to work. The AI will eventually attack you until you build a credible military, even if it just made a deal. Note that this too is exploitable. If you have a gold surplus and you anticipate attack, keep signing deals. Also, units have upkeep and early gold is very valuable, so deferring building your army until your ready to use it is optimal. Delaying also lets you build good units (Horses) that can clear a unit each turn and retreat, rather than inferior melee that suffers devastating counterattacks whenever it emerges from its fortification to kill something.

 

[King Jason]

Also something that can be done, in addition to warring with the enemy and pillaging their improvements for huge chunks of gold (best done with horses to avoid counter attacks), if you reach a point where the A.I. will give you a sizable peace deal (usually including a city), work the deal as if it's a regular trade. By this I mean add in your on luxuries and begin the process of seeing "what will make this deal work?".

The reason you do this is because the A.I. often has a substantial amount of GPT and this is the harder thing to acquire naturally in peace deals. They usually give you a lump sum, open borders, cities, and luxuries. Since often times cities are more a burden than a boon, and... if you really wanted cities you would've taken them yourself... By doing this you can manipulate the A.I. to give you most of their GPT instead of their cities.

Sometimes they'll still give you the cities too. Since in their eyes the offer is good since you beat them. It's as easy as adding some of your luxuries to the trade, deselecting their stuff, and hitting "what'll make this work" ~ once they offer you most of their gold, their GPT, and their luxuries... remove your luxuries from the trade and the A.I. should still find the deal favorable.

Now, I don't exactly consider this an exploit, since in most cases I'm taking their GPT instead of a city, since 9 times out of 10... I don't want their cities if I'm accepting peace.

I've gotten as much as 50+ gpt in the early game by siphoning the A.I. through war, not to mention pillaging most improvements provides you with several turns worth of gold you could acquire naturally.

 

[Dizzy75]

If you accept their cities, can't you also sell them to other AIs for a good chunk of change?

 

[Rittmeyer]

sometimes no one wants the cities, I think.

 

[HuntingX]

Great thread I also like to do the following:

A. Sell excess strategic resources whenever possible (iron mostly, as I find it basically worthless)
B. Haunting/ghosting single settler/warrior groups the computer sends out to settle, and capturing the worker. Not only do you get +5xp (for killing the warrior), +1 worker, you ALSO often get hundreds of gold as the computer sues for peace later.
C. Agreeing to war with far away civs through treaties with nearby civs. You gain influence with nearby civs, AND get favorable peace treaties with distant civs as they lose the war(s). All the while, you're safe from attack.
D. Remember that you can't steal more than 1 worker from city states safely, as the 2nd city state won't ever sue for peace, and will try to kill you.