The World's Banker

[Grey Wolf]

Hi everyone. I've just got civ IV replete with all expansion packs and am moving onwards and upwards from my Civ 3 days . (a bit late to the party I know).

Anyway in Civ 3 I played on Monarch and above and I used to run games at 0% tech rate and act as the world's banker. Doing this meant I would take lump sum payment from the AI and pay them pack in gpt. I would carry on doing this each turn for every AI's gold allowing me both to buy techs off them, which I would then broker, raising further gold and fund rushing of buildings and units in my empire. The other great advantage of this strategy is that the AI was less likely to declare war on you if you had a gpt deal with them. So I was wondering if this type of strat was still viable in Civ IV and if anyone here uses it??

Thanks for the Info

 

[Neal]

Not... really. Loans aren't really possible anymore, since a deal has to involve either lump sum or time-based components, but cannot include both.

 

[Winston Hughes]

To prevent such abuses, it's no longer possible to trade one-off items for per-turn items. Rush buying is much less powerful too.

Also, you'll find that right-of-passage-rape is now out of the question, and infinite-city-spam is no longer the meta strategy par excellence.

All of which are great improvements imo.

You should read this article. It's a little outdated now, but it might help ease the transition to Civ4.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Sadly, it doesn't work. The reasons:

1. As neal said, you can't mix lump sums and gpt anymore
2. It varies by AI, but all AI will stop trading you techs after you've traded for x techs with AIs they know. They have a small chance per turn to "forget" old trades. If you get an AI to friendly it will ignore this "WFYABTA - we fear you are becoming too advanced" constraint
3. AIs love to demand gold.

That said, you can get some leeway by trading mass surplus resources for gold and simply begging it off the AI, but gone are the days of "just get money and buy everything". Although, if you're good at diplo you can probably pull off a "gold economy" on most difficulties by expanding sufficiently, getting 1-2 AIs to friendly, and buying all your techs, but it won't be optimal.

 

[DaveMcW]

You'd probably enjoy being the world's spymaster.