So I'm not 20 turns into a new game and the first other race I run into is Yor, so I open trade trying to maybe haggle for a tech or two of theirs (I was synthetic too) but he was being super stingy. I wondered what it would take in creds/week for him to agree...and while I was at it I threw in all his techs...and a base...and a ship for fun. I may have gotten a little and frustrated and entered something like 90000000 creds/week (20 turns into a game, you know I'm good for it man...c'mon!). I thought there'd be no way he'd fall for it. There's gotta be some kinda creds/week check right...wrong! He said it was a generous offer ...and it was ...and I may have declared war on him immediately after he gave me all his techs.
Stupid robots, no concept of guile (it's safe bet the other races work like this too).
Personally this isn't a big deal, I just have to remind myself I'm a big boy and I don't need to cheat to win (it's no fun anyway)
But if the devs want to fix this they could just make you pay what you agreed to pay even if you go to war (you agreed to pay it) I was surprised it's not like that already. Want that 6 Duterium back you traded for 50 turns? War is the answer!
Thoughts?
As an afterthought every time see/say Yor I can't help but think the dev that made them up was wondering what to call them when a guy named Roy walked into his office.
LOL.
The basic problem for the AI is they lack the concept of strategy.
While I knew that war would cancel any trades and resources on loan, I did not know that you could enter a creds/week that was greater than your income. I honestly thought there would be some kind of check there that you can earn as much as you say you'll pay. I think that is definitely a bug. Where as the idea of trades then going to war is perhaps a design flaw.
It's already been discussed here https://forums.galciv3.com/466602/page/1/#3557802 and here https://forums.galciv3.com/466443/page/1/#3556919 , and I don't agree with limiting your offer to amount that you earn. In my games I almost always have negative earning, but a lot of money from trading technologies, so this solution will just remove ability to offer credits-per-turn to A.I. for no reason. I believe that I should be able to offer any amount I wish to, It's just that A.I. should have a little more sense. There is another another exploit with this issue, you may want to check my first link.
Clearly an exploit/oversight yes. Will require some minor AI tweaking which I am sure is in the works now.
Simply allow full value of a credit per turn agreement if it comes attached to a non-aggression agreement as well. Otherwise, the AI will have to discount trades over time in exchange for immediate goods.
At the very least you should not be able to offer a trade that you aren't even capable of honoring. I see no problem with trades exceeding income if you have enough credits to support the deficit, but if you can't meet the terms of the trade when you make it, it should not be allowed.
Indefinite trades are problematic, especially when combined with discrete items. Perhaps they should all be given a set term. And maybe cancelling a credit per turn treaty could pay out the outstanding balance as a penalty (or some other balance consideration).
There is no indefinite trade. You can see active treaty agreements from the diplomacy screens, including how many turns left on an existing treaty. 50 turns is the usual amount for any trade agreement.
Credits per turn helps guarantee cooperation from the civ getting the benefit of the treaty. It is an incentive to keep peace. It is part of the game to be able to make and break such treaties.
What I would find helpful is that when you try to declare war on a faction from the diplomacy screen, a confirmation window should pop up showing you what existing treaties are going to be cancelled if war is confirmed. (This would also prevent inadvertent war declarations as I am frequently doing with my missed clicks.
What I would also like to see is a "deal breaker" penalty which occurs when you declare war and you have outgoing credits or resources per turn treaties that you are cancelling early. This penalty would make your future offers to any civ for future credits or resources per turn treaties to be worth less and less.
In Civilization you get a massive diplomacy negative if you intentionally break certain agreements via war. If that could be implemented here, you'd be allowed to do this, but you'd be at war with everyone for the rest of the game. I don't know if that would make people happy or not. It would make for a funny type of game, deciding when to best take advantage and piss everyone off.
No penalties alone would outweigh buying everything A.I. has. Why will I be scared of war, when no one is a threat anymore? Not to mention, at that point I probably would have won the game through culture.
And limiting my offer just because I do not have the money right now just doesn't feel right to me. That's the whole point. You offer someone big amount of money for something you desperately need and then trade with everybody to be able to pay out your debt.
Then do the trades for the cash ahead of time, before you come to the table to bargain for what you need.
No sane entity would ever "just take your word you're good for it". And, until you cash in your other assets, their "value" is purely theoretical.
Put it another way: in what universe would someone lend you more money than your current Net Worth plus verified Income totals to?
Trades for more than your current credit sum plus income should just be disallowed, because they make no rational sense.
But that's my point! A.I. should be smarter. Trading immediate stuff for my "honest" promise to pay up in time is ridiculous. Would it not be better solution to disallow that, instead of introducing made up limitations?
Also, don't forget, there is a cooldown of 15 turns on trading, so it's not always possible to trade for the cash ahead of time.
Some ideas:
- Pay the first installment up front; That would immediately make the overly large contracts impossible, since you can't actually afford it. You would be limited to what you actually have. And even then one turn would most likely put you into the red if you make the agreement too juicy.
- Add a minimum contract length, before it can be cancelled.
- Make the contract function as a one-sided non aggression pact. As long as you aren't attacked by the other party and they do not cancel the agreement, you cannot attack them for the duration, nor can you cancel the agreement. That way you are stuck with it unless they strike first.
"Amount you earn" can be easily calculated by taking an average of your gains (but not spending) per turn for the last n (50?) turns and deducing the average of your upkeep for those same n turns from the result.
That takes care of any unstable income doesn't it?
AND it's in fact the only unexploitable (ok, let's face it - it's just the least exploitable) method of limiting anything by your gain, since the ACTUAL numbers of your wealth per turn are easy to crank up and back down whenever you want to by combining the power of sliders and the power of having a turn to yourself.
Of cause that's just a BASE on which AI can make a decision to trust or not to trust your offer.
You ARE after all capable of having all your sliders at their top for 50 turns and thus paying more than that. Not that you'd do that, but still.
And then there's the treasury size to consider which can help you to uphold your claims.
In ANY event, the whole point of limiting it by your supposed credibility and not just putting a lead on it altogether (either by complete restriction on war declaration or by forcing you to pay up regardless of war status) is exactly for the sake of allowing you to still fool the AI but only with reasonably believable numbers.
And any approach done for THAT sake, SHOULD revolve around your monetary potential.
How about limit it at the max amount a player can make per turn. So the amount you'd get for setting your resource slider all the way on wealth. That is obviously way more than you're pulling in per turn so it would let people with large amounts of credits spend them over time but wouldn't allow huge exploitative amounts to be entered.
How do you propose to deal with an "honest" promise to lend him all your strategic resources for 50 turn?
THAT kind of promise BTW is why there's a need for per turn payment in the first place. Still giving resources? Keep getting paid. Not giving them any more? Well, no more payments for you "jerk".
That said, I agree that swapping ANY "stretched" gain for any "instant" gain is a huge question of trust, and as such should not be done lightly (read: AI should not agree to mix these without a well made evaluation algorithm).
Edit:
Ok, I didn't get you right at first sorry. Specifically didn't get what you were saying to disallow.
I guess I shouldn't keep posting when I'm so tired.
There's no point in setting a strict limit at all.
There IS a point at making AI question your intentions after a certain amount related to your economic potential (see above).
Why am I saying that there's no point in strict limit?
Well, think about it.
Q: Why don't we want player to set anything OVER the limit?
A: Because we don't want him to use big numbers and "cheat".
Q: Then why don't we stop him from cheating by making him pay-up REGARDLESS of starting a war?
A: Because we don't want to stop him from cancelling that payment with a war.
Q: Why don't we want to stop him from cancelling a treaty with a war?
A: Beats me, UNLESS we want to let the player betray the AI with a REASONABLE promise.
And if we want that than there's shouldn't be a limit on what we can offer, only on what it will accept.
And if we DON'T want that then we can simply force the player to pay up regardless of war status and REGARDLESS of how ridiculous was the promise. After all, nothing is stopping the game from forcing the player into permanent negative with his -gazillion of credits per turn.
If you CAN maintain your offer - be my guest and offer it, you'll have to pay up anyway so why should the game guess if that number is realistic for you or not. If you can't, well, it's YOUR fault, cheater.
Sure you CAN set a number slightly above what you CAN handle, but that'll only affect you SLIGHTLY as well. It'll only kill your economy if aren't taking it seriously yourself.
Edit. Yep, I should definitely stop. Even the amount of typos is getting out of hand...
Also add to the possible solutions that the AI shouldn't trade more than say 10% of it's planets or newest model ships (obsolete ships may or may not be attached to this limit) in any 1 trading session...so that you cannot take almost their entire empire in 1 trading session...
I think this is a good point. In general I would disallow any per turn payment for an instant gain until the AI can be properly coded to handle it...if ever.
Since this thread has been moved and getting more attention, I will post similar problem here for convenience.
A.I. will trade 50X-1 bc for X bc per turn. At least, he did so in 1.01. Haven't check later versions. So it's like 1 bc interest credit loan.
I like this. If you make a deal and you're giving anything per turn, then you are forced to not declare war. The other party getting the items can declare war if they wish to forgo what you owe them. This prevents outrageous trades as 2000000 gold per turn would kill anyone, no matter what you got out of the deal. You'd be invaded 10x over before you ever produced a single ship.
I'm happy that is the case, and somewhat sad that I failed to notice that myself.
I'm a little confused by your second point; of course the benefiting party should want to keep the credits per turn going. My proposed penalty would not be payed to the benefiting party if that party is the one cancelling the treaty - that would be silly. So the incentive remains for the benefiting party, and gets added for the paying party - no more just getting out of paying.
Moving on to the rest of the thread, I like the idea of preventing the deal from being cancelled by war for at least a minimum of time. I still support limiting offering ability by current treasury plus expected income, to protect players from accidentally killing their economy. If someone still wants to intentionally game with that, artificially boosting income to have more trading power, fine. But they should be stuck with the fallout as they their economy crashes, unless they can make up the difference elsewhere. They should not be able to just declare war and be free of the deal.
I keep coming back to the problem of letting per turn agreements mix with up front agreements. I don't particularly want to suggest keeping them completely separate, as sometimes a one-off kicker is a good incentive. But if the per turn agreements can just be cancelled at any time without real consequence, perhaps mixing should not be allowed. Otherwise the relative value of per turn agreements would need to be severely reduced (so as to defend against the possibility of getting terminated early), which seems less desirable.
Why do you feel this game needs to "protect" players from "stupid" decisions? Hard to imagine something like this "accidentally" done.
Do you think it will be better to just allow per-turn-agreements only after signing non-aggression pact?
I totally understand, that from a gameplay perspective it's a fair idea to disable breaking such treaties with war and making player pay up anyway, but doesn't that break your immersion? How do you explain, why are you paying somebody who is in war with you? Maybe it would be better to make player pay up their promises to the remaining nations in the UP (if the player himself in the UP, of course). And as far as I know, it is not possible to cancel this kind of agreements at any time. Only by declaring war, so there is a consequence.
I just have to say that this "feature" completely ruins the game for me. I feel like there is no point to whatever I do during a span of hundreds of turns, as with this trick I can achieve everything effortlessly.
After reading the initial post, I decided to try it on my gigantic mapped game that had already advanced 300+ turns. I was dominating, but progress was slow as I had about 40 planets, tons of bases and a plethora of ships to move every turn. I opened a trade with Thalans, stole everything except their home world and declared war. Included in my loot was a fully loaded transport stationed next to that said home world, which I then proceeded to invade - Thalans got wiped out in that 1 turn.
Later, I started a new game and was happily exploring and colonizing nearby planets, minding my own business. Met the Iconians eventually, opened a trade, stole everything but the home world again and shot down their shipyard. Now I just wait until I get the tech to build transports.
What´s the fun in this?
P.S. And don´t tell me not to use this expl-I mean feature, as I play to win, not to restrict myself.
I completely agree. This does ruin any sense of achievement for me as well. But I'm sure it will be fixed soon one way or another!
Of course the AI should not give up everything it has for an unenforceable promise.
Personally I think there is a lot of debate on something the devs are probably going to fix very soon. I trust they will fix it in a way that is not too constricting.
I suspect that I I may have just found a bug that is related to this. It would be nice if someone can confirm it. Here are the parameters:
Game: 8 AI persona, all normal; Medium size spiral, turn 173 - I am playing as the Terrans and am in first place, version 1.03
Bug
Start dialog with AI in second place (Altarians for me) and select trade
In the following order
1. Add all technologies
2. Add all ships
3. Add all starbases
4. Add all planets other than homeworld
6. Add all trade resources
At this point the AI's response is 'You must be joking'
5. Add Make Weekly Payments of 100000000 (sufficient to roll over internal limit, you will know as it resets to the max value) From AI to player
Now the AI's response is the emphatic great deal and there is nothing in the Player trade window.
Accept the offer and repeat with new second place player (Krynn for me).
Some interesting things of note:
1. The Gain column is not formatted to handle all of the trade content, it ends up spilling over the treaty box
2. The Weekly Revenue From Treaties number box is too short to handle large amounts of bc ( 1 000 000 covers up text)
3. After acceptance of the trade for the Altarians, the Net amount shows as 0 bc. Unfortunately, I do not know if this happened before or after the second trade.
*Edit*
On turn 174 repeat above with new second player -- Income per turn now ~1.9 mil
On turn 175 credits go negative (-1385726) and all production is shut down. I still show incoming funds of ~1.9 mil per turn.
On turn 176 credits are positive again (532034) and production is up.
On turn 177 credits go negative (-1845783) ....
I suspect that the credit counter is overflowing.
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