Market Fluctuations in City Bribe Cost

[BlackJack]

I'm playing a game that's long since ended when my spaceship reached AC, I'm just trying to hone my war making skills.

Anyway, I send my spy walking around an AI city looking for the cheapest price - $25K, $25K, ..., $5,999. Say what???? I'm all over that of course. Later, similar thing except I'm getting really cheap so I blow up the courthouse first - then it's $20K everywhere????? In the first case, the spy of a veteran, in the second it didn't matter. Anybody got any insights???

[finbar]

Interesting question that has been thrashed around in these forums a couple of times. The bribe cost is a complex calculation involving the size of the treasury of the civ you're bribing, the city's distance from the capital, whether or not the city is in disorder, whether there are units in the city, and whether the bribing spy is a vet. It's also cheaper to bribe a city that was once your own - which is to say, the other civ took it from you at some stage.

The bigger the civ's treasury, the dearer the city will be; the further the city is from the capital, the cheaper it should be; revolt in a city at the time of bribery reduces the cost by 50%; the cost of an undefended city drops by 50%; and bribery by a vet dip is cheaper than bribery by a non-vet dip.

Someone even discovered that approaching (and bribing) a city from different directions - N,S,E or W - can vary the cost of the bribe.

There has been considerable debate about the actual equation used by the software and the mathematicians amongst us have torn out their hair trying to analyse it.

Hope this helps.

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[East Street Trader]

In the first case it is the distance to the capital element in the calculation which will be the most significant. The distance is measured from the bribing unit to the opposition capital. The cheapest price was achieved when your spy was on the square furthest away.

It looks, from the large disparity in the figures, as though the target city was quite close to the capital - because that gives a relatively bigger difference per square.

In the second case one explanation would be that the civ had no capital (having lost its palace and not yet rebuilt one). In that case a constant is used in the bribe cost formula, hence it ceases to matter from which square the bribing unit approaches.

[SlowThinker]

A precise bribing formula is in "Info: diplomats and spies" thread

[La Fayette]

quote: Originally posted by SlowThinker on 03-07-2001 02:59 PM A precise bribing formula is in "Info: diplomats and spies" thread

BlackJack, you MUST read that thread BEFORE you build your next dip or spy
(apart from 1 sentence that I left unfinished , it provides you with thoroughly tested results about anything you might dream to achieve with them).

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