What's up with this?

[Titus]

6 or more techs up and I'm "too advanced" for him?

In my current game, I have come to the realization that I HATE CYRUS! He's never been an actual military threat to me in any game, but the man is just an absolute parasite, demon and extortionist. I've come to his aid in his war against Spain, I've given him tribute twice, we share religion, open borders and I'm GIVING him resources, and he still will give up NOTHING to help me in my constant wars against nearby aggressors. He'll gladly lend his roads for my enemies to invade me. We even became "friendly" later on, and he STILL wouldn't do ANYTHING to help me against my enemies. From now on, I will make it a point to pound him into dust at the first opportunity, just for the hell of it (Gandhi and Mansa Musa are already on that list).

Now that I've got that out of my system, who's your most hated AI?

 

[potatokiosk]

The AI insists on ripping you off, and only when it feels like doing so. Basically, the cIV AI stinks. Doesn't matter who the leader is.

 

[Psyringe]

How often had you traded tech with Cyrus before?

There is a hard cap for the number of techs that an AI is willing to trade with you. "We fear you are getting too advanced" is the message displayed when this cap has been reached.

This is a rather crude game mechanism that I'd like to remove. In general, I regard the Civ4 AI as quite good however, especially compared to previous installments of the series. Of course there's still room for improvements, as Blake's work shows.

 

[KMadCandy]

yup to what Psyringe said. the WFYABTA thing kicks in at a certain number of techs (regardless of number of beakers they were worth). it is also affected by your score/power, if you're high there the other civs don't want to help your lead. apparently the number of techs limit applies between the AIs too.

how friendly you are with the civ affects the limit too. some leaders love to trade and will keep trading techs with you long after others wouldn't. mansa, who is on your most-hated list already, is one of those guys btw.

i <3 cyrus. when i'm playing as him that is.

 

[Titus]

Really? That's ridiculous. I traded a bunch of cheap techs with him in the ancient days, but he's always been way ahead of me technologically.

 

[paperchase417]

they wanted to give his character a realistic feel. By making him unreasonable, they've given you the feeling of dealing with a real person of Persian decent.

LoL

Its a joke, nobody get their panties in a bunch.

 

[KMadCandy]

yeah the fact that cheap techs are weighted the same as big fat whopping late techs irks me, did that show in my first post? this is basically there to prevent the 'buy all the techs from the AI by just making money and not doing much research' thing from civ3, which i do understand and agree with. it does still make me go arrrrgh at times tho.

i sometimes pick opponents that i know will trade with me longer, when my goal is a long/warmonger/hardish-for-me game, and of course other opponents to try to beat up. the complexity of politics between civs, how best to manipulate them against each other and to chose who i ought to befriend, is something i'm still very much a newbie at.

there's a lot of info (and rather heated debate) about it on the Realms Beyond forum, which is where i learned about it. some info from sullla and more from sirian, they were both involved with developing civ4 and post here often as well (and hopefully don't mind me mentioning them by name!).

the threads there are from january and february 2006, quite old and quite long, so you probably don't want to go through all the reading. but just because i bothered to find them, i'm gonna link 'em.

first thread

second thread

 

[tom1734]

i dont like the german man he always gets angry,
but if you get friendly he'll do anything for you.
I got him to declare war on all the other 10 AI players.

 

[Rots]

I find Roosevelt very unwilling to trade even when friendly. Actually, just trying to get him Friendly is an effort even when he's converted to your religion, half your government ideas and long trading relations etc

In that game in which Roosevelt was being difficult, I had the entire known world (6 of 8 civs) under my religious thumb. It was awesome, even though many of them were enemies to each other they were all at least pleased or friendly with me. When we discovered the remaining two civs, they had a hard time fitting into the Aztec Budist world I had created!

 

[GenMarshall]

It would has to do on how your relationship is to the Civ in Question. Civs can only trade with you if you have a good enough reputation and relationship with them. But I have never seen that poping up before.