What's up with the AI being super stingy with their techs? In my current game Justinian I is at +14 (Friendly) with me and offered to trade me rifling for steel and I'd have to give him 1500 gold. For reference I'm playing marathon speed so steel costs some ~13500 beakers while rifling only costs ~11500 beakers, what gives why are the AI so stingy with industrial era + techs?
The AI seems stingy in all eras as it won't accept deals that don't give it a distinct advantage. However, you can trade around the same tech to all other civs for more techs, gold, war starting and other things like diplomacy, giving the opportunity for much bigger returns than simply from one AI. Trebling the
value of the tech your trading is sometimes possible! I would certainly be wary of giving away steel mind you, I would prefer to abuse it by running over any pre rifling civs I can find
While I can't answer your question I have a few of my own about tech trading as well for those more experience than I. Are there certain techs that the AI tend to ignore that are good to trade them? If I am ahead in tech research (which I knew gets less and less as the difficulty goes up) is it worth it to trade a tech or two behind what I am to backfill other techs?
On Monarch and above backfilling techs while heading to Liberalism is one of the most used strategies.
"Tradebait" techs AIs don't go for is one of the main strengths of the Liberalism beeline!
Paper, Philosophy, Education, Liberalism itself and even the free tech all make great tradebait (I prefer Steel from Lib and I won't trade that however
).
Philosophy is very important in this line, as once Taoism has been founded, the AI almost completely ignore it! This and the fact you can bulb it with a G.Scientist leads to an easy run at Liberalism and guarantees people to trade to, G.Scientists can also bulb Paper, Education and Liberalism itself.
Aesthetics gains imporance on the higher difficulties to (starting at Immortal?), using it to part trade for alphabet is a great help.
Steel itself is something the AI will often leave a long time, which helps cement steel as *the* gamebreaker tech. I don't trade this I use it to steamroll, later I may trade it toward Physics or something, but not till its about to become an obsolete tech.