arms trading.

[C. Free]

you can't buy or sell arms. what the hell? this would be great for propping up somebody you need.

[Shogun Gunner]

A game feature deemed to easy for the human player to exploit against the AI.

[C. Free]

let the ai do it, too.

[Modo44]

The AI is dumb enough to sell workers. That's bad enough, really.

[gunkulator]

True, but in Civ2 you could gift advanced units to the AI. I'd recommend making it horrendously expensive for the human to buy advance units from the AI, but going in the other direction would be a good idea.

[Rhothaerill]

They're not going to change it for Civ3 now. They're basically done with it after the C3C v1.22 patch. Any new features (or old as the case may be) would have to be considered for Civ4 not Civ3.

[Shogun Gunner]

There is a thread in the Civ4 section that addresses this. Lots of people are for it, if it can be done in a way to not compromise SP games. (read: dumb AI)

[Paddy]

yeah it would have been fun to have it

[Vince278]

[MrWhereItsAt]

What do you mean by this? Selling/exchanging troops with another civ? This shouldn't be difficult to implement, as it was in SMAC. Perhaps Firaxis decided it wasn't such a good idea for some reason in Civ3. For example an ally could gift someone half a dozen defensive units and have them instantly appear in their last remaining city, preventing conquest. This would be rather unbalancing, I feel. If gifted units change ownership without changing position, you couldn't gift units from inside your own cities, and since you can only gift units that are outside, you'd need to somehow have a way of gifting the exact unit you wanted to gift, so you'd need some kind of map-based gifting screen or option. And if you were trying to gift multiple units in a single trade then you couldn't just click on a single unit and use the 'gift to' key. And if you had a key to gift a unit, how would you gift units that had already moved?

As you can see there are quite a number of issues with this feature, and I imagine it would take rather some thought and coding time to get such a small addition sorted. But then perhaps they have some ideas now, and something like it will be in cIV.

[punkbass2000]

Also it would probably be fairly easy to exploit the AI unless some general restiriction like the one on city-trading were implemented.

[Kataphraktoi]

but if they had an airport that is possible and realistic.after retaking the area with your units,you could even gift all the cities back to him

you could only gift units that were in cities and then only in diplomacy MWIA,although i never used this option

also,if you sent an advanced unit over,you could reverse engineer abilties\options it had into your own units courtesy of the unit workshop IIRC

[Cookie Monster]

I loved being able to create special units for export in SMAC. I wish they had this feature for Civ3, hopefully for Civ4. Are you listening Meier?

[Mad Bomber]

Originally posted by Cookie Monster
I loved being able to create special units for export in SMAC. I wish they had this feature for Civ3, hopefully for Civ4. Are you listening Meier?

I doubt that Sid has little direct contact with the sofware developers, it seems to me he's semi-retired from the gaming world. Even if he is working with Firaxis, it is certain that he is not checking the fan sites for comments, as it is rare to see a Firaxian on the boards these days.

[Tattila the Hun]

Perhaps gifting would require working trade route... Also, perhaps one could mark, in city view, the units that are "available" for gifting. Also, depending on tech level, the appearing of the units would take some turns.

(Though, if military strength would be measured in manpower and equipment, you could send, hmm, "volunteers" to aid in the strugle, to be armed by the receiver, or material aid, used by the receivers nationals, or both. In my idea, in peace time you don't usually have an army, just a number of manpower depending on your birthrate/average age/conscription rate/budget, and anything from crossbows to tanks mothballed.
Someone declares war, and depending on your military readynes, you can summon a number of units to the border. One could have huge army with average equipment, like China, or smallish army with 1'st rate equipment, like the US...)