Trading a lump sum for over-time commodities

Celevin

King
Joined
Jul 21, 2010
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This is far too common in my games now:

Trade a com several luxuries, and all my gold per turn for all their gold. I don't care if it's a bad deal. Then I declare war, and all the trades end.

You really should NOT be able to trade coms lump sums of gold for over-time commodities. If you can, it should be a permanent switch even if war is declared. This is too powerful of a strategy, and has made Deity games much much easier.
 
Didn't feel the need for much diplomacy so far but it sure must be, especially with the ridiculous amount of gold they carry around. Usually most of my diplomacy revolves around cities I can't keep because of happiness, and I can take them back whenever I feel like it afterward instead of having to declare war "now" to avoid paying gpt.
 
Hmm, hadn't heard of this one yet, I'm amazed the devs failed so badly at so many things like this.

For the record, this exact thing was in civ3, trading "per turn" commodities for lump sums, and of course was heavily abused (though they did eventually end up with the effect of making every other AI hate you almost permanently, for being a "traitor" on deals like that).

It was taken out explicitly in civ4 to prevent abuse and mostly to acclaim from players.

Guess they had to get it rid of such restrictions because it was so awful in civ4.
 
Posted the same thing yesterday. It's just too obvious.

The AI pays way too much for luxuries it doesn't need, and offers far too generous loan terms given that you can welch. Strictly better would be to just tone down what the AI pays for luxuries by a wide margin, and offer credit terms based on relative power. If you're weak, you're a good credit risk. If not, you aren't.
 
havent been able to abuse this much. once an AI hates me they dont want to do deals anymore. none of my luxuries interest them at all
 
The AI won't necessarily buy luxuries off you, but they'll ALWAYS take gpt, no matter how much they hate you.

So instead of trading luxuries (which require a worker and building them etc) you're better off just trading gpt for gold and declaring straight away :)
 
The simple solution seems to be to just not do it. If its a necessary part of your win strategy, maybe you need to drop down a level or two. This should be no more difficult to resist than the temptation to world builder in units in Civ IV. Both are possible, but both are clearly cheating.

On another note, this activity does seem to generate a lot of hate for you towards other AI's. Once an AI doesn't like you they start skewing trades in their favor (wont trade resources 1 for 1, pay less for your strategic and lux resources, wont enter research agreements, etc).

On the topic of trading away your luxuries for lump sums of gold, this is an entirely different matter. You are taking a risk when you do so, and you are also contributing towards the AI's next golden age (every time you give him a resource, thats 30 x 5 happiness towards his next golden age). The risk is that you end up needing that resource back before the deal expires. I've cost myself some early growth several times when a barb comes in and pillages one of my happiness resources, stopping my growth until I can kill him and get a worker down to repair the improvement (and worker turns are valuable in and of themselves as well).

Do they pay too much for your resources? I can't say for sure. Seems the max is 300 gold if you have no black marks with them, and it goes down considerably if they dislike you (less than 100 gold is what I've been offered at times). This is roughly the cost of rush buying an ancient era unit (worker, warrior, spearman, archer). I will say that the AI doesn't seem to take into account the opportunity cost of that extra resource very well (i.e. what else they may have been planning to do with that money). I do think that certain phases of their development plan should have them put less emphasis on the value of resources. For instance, when building up for a war they should be saving money for buying units (though I'm not sure if they AI will actually rush buy units in any other instance than for last minute defense).
 
Though it doesn't matter how skewed the deal is because the intent is that once you get their gold, you're cancelling the deal via DoW that same turn. You can offer every single one of your resources and all of your GPT, in the end, it doesn't matter.

I do agree though that it's pretty obvious this is "cheating" on your part. It's almost akin to whining about game balance when you rig the map in your favor everytime you play. Or somebody saying the game is too easy but they save/reload all the time.

Sure. You can do it and get away with it. Doesn't mean you should.

That said, I still agree these things should be fixed. However, If I ever feel like something I'm doing is an exploit... I simply don't do it. Which is why I never rush the A.I. They clearly aren't capable of fending off a rush in anyway.

In an ideal world, we shouldn't have to give the A.I. these handicaps. However, on the flip side, we also shouldn't exploit them either. Imo, finding that standard is up to each of us as players until things are "fixed" or removed altogether. There were plenty of systems I enjoyed from civ4 that I didn't partake in because the A.I. had no concept of their appropriate use ~ three easy examples; firstly, the two halmarks of BTS: Espionage and Corporations.

But more alike what we're discussing now; mass stockpiling units with city raider III to upgrade into rifles, and then stomp the world. It was very easy to get at least one city that could produce city raider 3 units... So you build them over and over until you get rifles, then upgrade to an unstoppable force. Sure, I can do that... but the A.I. doesn't have the capacity to understand executing a strategy like that. So technically, it shouldn't be done.

Additionally, I feel a lot about winning on Deity in civ4 was learning some of the exploits anyway. In this case, civ5 may be no different.
 
The difficulty standard this time around is a lot lower than it was in Civ IV. A vanilla Deity win on standard settings, what with all the nerfs, is now a serious accomplishment.

Deity is advertised as a setting that will push us to the brink, and it should. This is an obvious shortcut that's easy to fix and provides a substantial competitive advantage. The only difference in what I've been doing is that I bait the AI into attacking me by deliberately presenting a weak profile, rather than declaring war myself. Playing possum seems to me to be the way to go. One Horse will thrash the AI early on because the AI is bad at combat, and the Hammer returns from early infrastructure spending are very large.

I look at things a little differently, I suppose. The way I see it, the AI cheats, and the only way I'm going to beat it under those conditions is cheat right back. That doesn't require using the World Builder, but it does require taking advantage of the fact that it's AI and predictably does stupid things. If you want to be sporting about the whole thing, that's your call.
 
I look at things a little differently, I suppose. The way I see it, the AI cheats, and the only way I'm going to beat it under those conditions is cheat right back. That doesn't require using the World Builder, but it does require taking advantage of the fact that it's AI and predictably does stupid things. If you want to be sporting about the whole thing, that's your call.

Well I do actually agree with this, I mentioned that a lot about deity wins, which are usually advertised as "impossible" is actually about learning the exploits. The only problem I see with civ5 is that there seem to be so damn many of them, and they're mostly obvious. It seems the difficulty of the game has dropped dramatically.

Also, not all "cheats" are created equal. Robbing the gold from the A.I. might be a justifiable drain on them since their economy is boosted to such extremes like needing happiness in (in one Deity game, the list of happy folks came up early in the game, I was at a measly 8 - the rest of the world was 30 or higher, I doubt they had that many luxuries). However, Celevin's other strategy of reaping the benefits of a large empire, only to sell it off piece by piece at the last moment for a cheap cultural win is an exploit that in my mind should not be possible under any circumstances.

But I do agree that Deity should absolutely be the level that the only way you have a chance at winning is to play the game to any advantage you can get, even if it means exploiting the A.I. ~ because that's what it's always been about, really.
 
Well, since Civ 3 anyway. Deity in Civ 2 and Transcend in SMAC were not hard to roll. Deity in Civ 5 feels about as challenging as Transcend was on SMAC at this point. There were a lot of unbalanced paths to beating that game. In part, that was because the game presented so many options and the AI had no hope of managing them all effectively.
 
I didn't play civ that seriously before 3, hell I didn't even really get into the different kinds of challenges until 4 really. I almost always played on the standard settings, maybe a bit higher.

civ4 really brought the min/max micro/macro demon out in playing the game because there were just so many layers to everything. But with civ5, I think I play that way so subconsciously now that I do good without even trying. Before, I bumped the difficulty for a challenge.. now, I seem to be doing it just to be fair.

But this is besides the point.. I still find civ5 fun as hell. Though I'd like to see some things fixed, even if they aren't... if I truly have a problem with them I simply won't do it in my own games.
 
I do agree though that it's pretty obvious this is "cheating" on your part.

Cheating? I strongly disagree. This feature is clearly intentionally brought back to the series by Firaxis despite them knowing how players will use it. Firaxis have proven with Civ4 that they are able to "fix it", still they chose not to. This clearly separates it from a lot of other issues that either are not working as intended or they simply are unable to fix.

Is this an exploit? No. It's just bad game design.
 
Cheating? I strongly disagree. This feature is clearly intentionally brought back to the series by Firaxis despite them knowing how players will use it. Firaxis have proven with Civ4 that they are able to "fix it", still they chose not to. This clearly separates it from a lot of other issues that either are not working as intended or they simply are unable to fix.

Is this an exploit? No. It's just bad game design.

Meh. I don't think that's clear at all. For example, if I wanted to, I could say it's clearly an indication that civ5 was designed by a bunch of hacks.

Not that that's my opinion. But it's the same difference. It was either something that was overlooked, or it wasn't. Either way, there's nothing clear about it, and this thread was created under the pretense that a system like this is easy to use and, like you said yourself, is pretty bad design.

So yea, I maintain the belief that it's an exploit because it makes absolutely no sense from a design point that a player should be able to siphon their opponents gold for absolutely zero cost to themselves.

The fact that it was fixed in civ4 isn't an indication of anything. It's just as likely it was an oversight as it could be part of intended design. Especially since civ5 seems to have quite a handful of oversights, I'd say it's a possibility. Oversights aren't restricted to the new aspects of civ5's design, it's just as easy and as likely that they miss things when implementing previous designs.
 
The AI pays way too much for luxuries it doesn't need, and offers far too generous loan terms given that you can welch. Strictly better would be to just tone down what the AI pays for luxuries by a wide margin, and offer credit terms based on relative power. If you're weak, you're a good credit risk. If not, you aren't.

Agreed. The AI still buys horses and iron from me and we're both heavily teched past that (I'm running around with mechanized infantry, he got artillery/infantry). I can still get ~45 gold for 2 horses for instance, when he's never really going to use them or the iron.
 
This is far too common in my games now:

Trade a com several luxuries, and all my gold per turn for all their gold. I don't care if it's a bad deal. Then I declare war, and all the trades end.

You really should NOT be able to trade coms lump sums of gold for over-time commodities. If you can, it should be a permanent switch even if war is declared. This is too powerful of a strategy, and has made Deity games much much easier.

It's called A PONZI SCHEME! Very life-like! roflmao
 
On the topic of trading away your luxuries for lump sums of gold, this is an entirely different matter. You are taking a risk when you do so, and you are also contributing towards the AI's next golden age (every time you give him a resource, thats 30 x 5 happiness towards his next golden age)
Imagine 5 of us are sitting in a room playing a game whose objective is to make the most points. This could be an FPS, or a game of Civ.

A strategic move on your part lets you gain 1 point, but in doing so you must give 3 points to another player. You can do this move multiple times.

Is it a good move?
 
Is it still cheating if you don't declare war the next turn and just let the deal run its course? I just consider it as taking out a loan. Don't pay back, they won't give anymore $$
 
Imagine 5 of us are sitting in a room playing a game whose objective is to make the most points. This could be an FPS, or a game of Civ.

A strategic move on your part lets you gain 1 point, but in doing so you must give 3 points to another player. You can do this move multiple times.

Is it a good move?

Not if the move is available to the other 4.
 
Imagine 5 of us are sitting in a room playing a game whose objective is to make the most points. This could be an FPS, or a game of Civ.

A strategic move on your part lets you gain 1 point, but in doing so you must give 3 points to another player. You can do this move multiple times.

Is it a good move?

You are assuming you know exactly the point values of these moves, and that there are no other rules to the game which might change the outcome. Dont be silly, this is a terrible example, and in no way shape or form could a game like Civ V ever be put into such simplistic terms.
 
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