Diplomacy Strategies (Emperor+)

[Artifex]

Do you have a strategy? I check AI's every turn and try to get workers from them if possible. Tech trading is tricky and I am curious as to what some people use as a strategy since the AI trade techs to each other at ridiculously cheap prices.

[Arrian]

I play down on lowly Monarch, but here are a couple of general rules I try to go by:

1) If I'm trying to sell tech, I first call up each AI customer and see what they will pay. A civ that will give me tech is most likely to be my first customer, followed by civs with cashola.

1a) If buying tech (admittedly, not often on Monarch), I certainly prefer to enrich weaker AI civs.

2) During my round of diplo investigation mentioned in #1, if I find I can purchase a tech from a broke civ, I probably will, and get my money back by selling them my new tech (once I've already gotten as much as I can from richer/smarter civs).

3) I will trade tech to a backwards civ for luxuries... better that then giving money or (*gasp*) tech to powerful civs.

4) Workers, yeah, buy 'em if you can.

5) When purchasing allies for a war, I will do my best to pay GPT or provide a luxury/resource supply, so that if (when) they betray me and make peace early, the benifit they gained from me will disappear. Not sure if this is really that important strategically, but it makes me feel better.

6) Sell things for GPT - luxuries are the best for it. I like selling luxuries more than strategic resources. This probably stemms from some early games in which I sold key strategic resources to an ally and the bastards up and attacked me with units they were only able to build because I gave them the materials to build them. I will sell strat resources to fairly weak civs, particularly once the age in which said resource is dominant is over (iron in the industrial age - yeah, it allows RRs, but the AI will pay outrageous sums for it. Saltpeter once I have infantry... sure!). Basically, if I'm relatively certain it won't come back to haunt me, I'll sell it for GPT.

-Arrian

[ducki]

Originally posted by Arrian
5) When purchasing allies for a war, I will do my best to pay GPT or provide a luxury/resource supply, so that if (when) they betray me and make peace early, the benifit they gained from me will disappear. Not sure if this is really that important strategically, but it makes me feel better.

You can do that?
Why have I never read that anywhere else?
That's bloody brilliant, that is!
I feel like such an idiot for not having thought of it.

[Cerbykins]

It's a relative given, even for fools like myself

Not only that, you can tie in other parts of the deal you only want the guy to have for the duration of the war - like ROP, or 'resource gifts' (normally given out to make the little sucker into a worthwhile ally)

I won't check players every turn (could be painful with 15 opponents ) but I WILL check in on them regularly if there's some specific I want to do, like sell off an iron surplus or tech trading when a little behind.

Also lowly Monarch, I'm afraid
Still, the rules are abut the same. Main difference would probably be that tech trading'll happen a bit more often.

[vmxa1]

Ducki luxs are my favorite for war deals. That keeps them more likely to stay the course than even money. The bigger tehy are the more they want to hold those luxs.

My worse is to give a tech, they can quit any time and they still get to keep it. I give techs when I only really want to keep them from coming in against me.

[Cerbykins]

Nice idea...I might do that
Is there any proof yet that AI stays in longer for lux than gpt?

[vmxa1]

They do because they are being pressed by WW and unhappy citizens. They will take the hit, but are more likely to keep the deal.

[Puma]

Yes what Arrian said. The one thing I hate about giving money to weaker civs though is that they sometimes end up giving that money to my strongest opponent :doitnow:
Using civ3, in the ancient age, I tend to choose something like math as my second research tech ... something that the civs leave for last ... so that I can catch up.
Maybe the one exception to Arrian's point 1) in tech trading, if I'm leading, I will get a tech like nationalism from a lagging/weak civ - which sometimes forces me to get money/luxuries from the next civs I trade with. However, this saves me 4 turns in being able to determine when someone else finds espionage, and also gives me the mobilize ability.

One thing I hate is trying to figure out when a civ is about to find a tech so I can sell it out before that civ finds it. I find that if I don't sell a tech within 6 turns of finding it, someone else will find and sell it. The other side of that is that then everyone ends up keeping up in techs ... so I selectively refuse to sell to certain lagging civs .. in order to make them lag even more - to the point that other civs will refuse to trade techs to them. Preferably, I refuse sale to non-scientific and non-commercial civs, but that's also depending on their size, etc. Sometimes it backfires, and they still get the tech from someone else I sold to. To prevent that little problem I try to keep their treasuries empty, but sometimes they still get it - which really pi**es me off because it turns the game into an endless tech after tech race. That's when I go bonkers on the nearest civ that causes that problem to continue.
Once I tried logging and analyzing their counteroffer patterns and comments, without executing the trade - sometimes it takes them 10 turns to find a tech - but in the end I could get nothing out of it. The results were not conclusive. Can someone offer any help in this issue?
I found going bonkers on the problem causing civ to be more entertaining.

[nbarclay]

Here's a trick I use sometimes: if I want to sell a tech for an alliance plus gpt, I don't make the deal straight because if my ally makes peace early, I lose the remaining gpt. Instead, I pay cash up front for the alliance and then sell the tech to get the cash back and the gpt. (Of course that only works if the other civ doesn't need gpt payments from the civ we're declaring war on to pay me the gpt I expect.)

A variant I haven't tried yet (and indeed only just now thought of) would be to buy an alliance for gpt and then sell a tech to get back that gpt plus the gpt the civ already had available to offer. That could make quitting the alliance early especially nasty for my ally. The idea seems sound (subject to the caveat above), but I can't offer any guarantees. One other note: if you offer gpt to a civ that can't already afford to pay you gpt, don't count on being able to cut a deal to get your gpt back in a subsequent deal.

The main times using a tech to purchace an alliance, albeit possibly indirectly, is attractive are (1) if the luxuries you can offer aren't sufficiently valuable to get the alliance or (2) if you can get enough gpt for the tech to make the overall package worthwhile. Otherwise, using a luxury rather than a tech as a bribe probably makes more sense.

Another interesting aspect of alliances is that under some conditions, enlisting an ally can free a resource so you can trade for it. If A is currently selling its spices (or whatever) to B, and you enlist A as an ally against B, that kills their deal. You now have the ability to purchase the spices (or whatever). Embargoes could presumably be used for a similar purpose under the right conditions, but I haven't tried that yet. Of course you have to be careful that the embargo won't prevent you from making a deal you consider important.

[nbarclay]

In regard to more peaceful dealings, keep in mind that techs are vastly more valuable to the second civ that gets them than they are after that. Thus, waiting until more than one other civ has a tech to try to purchase or trade for it is often advantageous. For example, I rarely trade for Nationalism until at least two AIs have it.

In some cases, disparities in tech values depending on how many civs know a tech can make it advantageous to delay making a trade in the early game until you've met more civs. That can be especially true for Seafaring civs on archipelago maps, since their potential for growing numbers of contacts is enormous. In other situations, the question, "Do I go ahead and trade starting techs or wait until I meet another AI?" involves a lot more of a gamble.

[Truman_Capote]

I make the following type of deal right before I launch large invasions of other countries whenever I can:

I Give.....................................They Give
Furs........................................1200 g
60 gpt.....................................World Map

Once the war starts, I'm only out 35 gold and my gpt goes right back up to normal when our agreement is canceled. I also got my furs back. Sometimes if the neighbor I'm going to war with has a huge amount of gold relative to me, I'll push my treasury tax slider up to 100% so I can cheat as much gold out of them as possible.

[Thrar]

Originally posted by Truman_Capote
I make the following type of deal right before I launch large invasions of other countries whenever I can:

I Give.....................................They Give
Furs........................................1200 g
60 gpt.....................................World Map

Once the war starts, I'm only out 35 gold and my gpt goes right back up to normal when our agreement is canceled. I also got my furs back. Sometimes if the neighbor I'm going to war with has a huge amount of gold relative to me, I'll push my treasury tax slider up to 100% so I can cheat as much gold out of them as possible.

if you get them to declare war on you, that's fine (apart from being a pretty nasty exploit imo), however you should think twice about declaring war yourself.
Your reputation will be killed, since you broke an existing per-turn deal to your profit, as a result no AI civ that knows of this (has contact with the victim) will ever accept per-turn payments from you except if it's per-turn from both sides (eg. lux for gpt). Same thing will happen if the trade route is broken for any reason, even if you didn't do anything about it.

[Truman_Capote]

Usually when the other civ has enough gold that I can pull that stunt, I'm at a point where I'm beyond caring about my reputation anymore, especially with them. On occassion, the AI will be so rich, that I make an trade like I posted and then go to war with them just to get their money, having no conquering ambitions at that point.

I've found that people will still accept gpt deals with me, especially the ones I took into the war on my side. They're all eager to make war against my enemy, the biggest AI, whom they're jealous of.

I don't have much luck goading people into war, sadly. How does one go about that?

[vmxa1]

Spy planting is great. Before then you have to keep asking for cities or something to get them furious.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by nbarclay
For example, I rarely trade for Nationalism until at least two AIs have it.

Nationalism seems to stay ludicrously expensive - even if three civs have it and you exclusively have Steam & Medicine, you can't get a decent deal - it seems.