Trade Wars/Hamstrining your opponents

[MadDjinn]

Has anyone been able to effectively manipulate/use the trade part of the game?

Forcing others to give up key resources, or out and out buying them?

getting others to stop trading with some, etc?

in *most* cases, the AI will only ask for trades where you have more than 1 of something, but it could happen that 2 or more want the same thing at the same time, so all the requests are queued up together.

I only ask this, bc I noticed that it's possible to trade away your last resources point in X resource. considering that not everyone can get key resources, or that the tiny nation gets 2 of a key one that you don't, or your enemy is getting some key resource from a friend, etc...

I realised that you could trade your last resource when in a game not long ago, Cathy asked to trade me for some horses... I figured it was ok, and didn't check to see how many I had. many moons later, when I started to want to build Cav. since I was getting attacked, I noticed that I didn't have any horses!

Cathy, thankfully, was willing to step in with her horde and squash the enemy...

[ghen]

You can trade your last resource any time you want. Any resource that has a (1) has only 1 location in your country :P

[snafuc4]

Re: Trade Wars/Hamstrining your opponents

Originally posted by MadDjinn
in *most* cases, the AI will only ask for trades where you have more than 1 of something,

Not IME! It'll ask for non-strategic resources at any time, whether you have only 1 or not (this is easier to visualise with the latest patch that tells you x of y is being traded - prepatch it simply said 'trade' & you can't find out how good/bad this is as you can't access the relevant screen)

Certainly now (v1.52) the strategic stuff (copper, iron. horses etc) appears not to be asked for unless you have more than 1, but I'm still testing huge map stability, so I could be wrong here..

[MadDjinn]

hmm.. interesting.

I just patched to 1.52, so I'm still seeing some changes there... so maybe this is more pre-patch.

as for checking out if it's a bad trade, I usually 'negotiate' and remove the resource on my side to see if it had more than 1, then redo the trade. sometimes you can get them to toss in some gold or other stuff if they were just stretching in the first place.

but as to the original Q: has anyone been able to force an AI civ to hand over the last point of strategic resources?