There is? I thought that was a "discussed on the forums but never acted upon" deal. Is it just a matter of other AIs being less likely to trade or give you fair deals if you DoW the turn after you get a lump sum for something?
The costs are opportunity costs, and depending on the situation they can overpower any incentive to spam war decs to farm money:
- You can't sign RA with that civ while at war, and possibly after
- You can't milk said AI for DoF mutual friends which lets you get away with murder elsewhere for a while
- Any alternative benefit (such as trading for their resources/more gold using something other than war) is gone
- You take a permanent relations hit every time you declare, and AI who like your target won't like war shenanigans
- You have to actually be strong enough to at least survive the war! Not hard, but it requires some up-front investment into defenses on high difficulties.
Doing this at the wrong time could easily cost you the game...which means one needs strategy to recognize and employ it properly.
The narrow definition of an exploit is: taking advantage of a clear bug in the game's mechanics. The old "whipping bug" in IV is an example
Too bad firaxis never actually fixed the bug - instead of too much overflow, they removed all overflow -----> gold and reintroduced the micro necessary to avoid it. They said they were trying to "clean up" the code in unofficial 3.17 where overflow was handled properly, basically admitting error here...
and then never lifted a finger to change it ever again
Don't think for a second that I'm only hating in firaxis civ V conduct; they have done very questionable things and left aspects of gameplay unfinished for years before civ V.
Things that I do, but don't enjoy: RA blocking. It's pretty clear that the best tech strategy on Deity is to maintain RAs with all AIs (even when you have to force-feed them gold, it's still ridiculously undercosted), and use your beakers/turn to effectively steer those RAs to expensive techs. This is not fun. It is poor design. But it's also clearly deliberate, not a bug or an oversight -- the last patch changed the threshold for blocking from 25% to 33%, so the developers are clearly aware of blocking strategies, and considered them possibly overpowered (hence the balance change) but not fundamentally an exploit.
I agree its bad design. Tech trades were pretty bad too, but the choice between completely random outcomes or esoteric micro (in a game supposedly meant to be better for casuals!!!!) really grates.
I'd be curious to find out; does the AI actually lack the capacity to see 'exploitative' trade deals such as luxury for gold and DoW coming? If they are meant to weigh risk into their considerations, then it's not an exploit, but I think the defining line would be if they have no such capacity. That would be taking advantage of them in a way that they cannot counter, and that fits the general idea of something that is 'unfair'. If they are just bad at weighing risk, then you're not being exploitative in taking advantage of their deficiency so much as using your relative intelligence over them, but if they simply do not take risk into account, then it would seem to me that it's exploitative, because it's not something you're meant to be doing.
There's no logic for putting the break point there. The AI is incapable of consistently evaluating good sites for national wonders, it is incapable of determining when a war is in its best interests, and it is incapable of using its military properly vs a tactical human who can "farm" it for xp and great generals. Whether the AI does any of that semi-ok or terribly is RNG. Whether the AI makes a lump sum deal with you and breaks it by declaring on you (!) is also RNG.
Again, for variant play it can be fun to make up extra rules or handicap yourself, but I've yet to see someone present a logical reasoning to draw the line here rather than somewhere else; the AI is bad at a LOT of things or simply isn't coded to do a lot of things; many of these things people would not consider to be exploits!
It's pretty dubious to even believe the AI was intended to play like a human; I personally think it should, but do you think the devs intended it that way? We see a lot of evidence they did not. Why, then, hate on strategies that abuse deliberately allowed AI ignorance? Isn't that what the bonuses were placed into the game to fight against? Why not draw the line anywhere? Flip a coin, one game you must auto workers...it's all the same :/.
Given that the AI will take a 'risk' and break a LSG for lux deal shortly after signing it, by DoWing me, I'll give the dev. the benefit of the doubt that a risk assessment was part of the deal. they just had a problem of understanding the numbers.
Unfortunately, I know way too much about civ IV to give them a benefit of the doubt in AI code for V

. I'm betting you got sheer RNG screwed where the AI just doesn't check for PTO obligations inbound when declaring...possibly so that humans don't game anti-war by selling PTO, but more likely because they didn't feel it was necessary (or didn't consider it).
Kind of silly that the AI committed a HoF violation on you though

. I'm sure you dropped the ban hammer very hard on that one

.