Which other thread? If there's been some discussion on possible workarounds for the GPT bug, I'd be interested to see it.
I recognized the problem of getting 50% of an AI's gold in one deal and then 50% of what's left in another before I posted. But between increased purchasing power for the top AIs and decreased gold for humans, such a rule would at least mitigate the bug's damage. Trading two techs and a luxury to get 7/8 of an AI's gold isn't as bad for the AI as getting 8/8 of the AI's gold for a single tech. Also note that the multiplicative effect helps compensate for the fact that if an AI gets full value at half price, that shifts the balance of advantage in the AI's favor.
I came up with another approach that is even more elegant from a technical perspective, but didn't post it earlier because it is tougher to implement. The basic idea would be to sell techs for 60% of what an AI is willing/able to pay and then treat the AI as if the other 40% did not exist for the 20 turns of the deal. Thus, human players would get 20% more gold for their GPT deals than they would under normal rules, while AIs would get to keep 40% of the gold they would have paid. In practical terms, the procedure for a deal would be something like:
1) Find out how much GPT the AI has available. (The transition to "would never accept the deal" marks where an AI doesn't have the GPT to make a deal even if it wanted to.)
2) Calculate the total current GPT the civ is paying you and subtract 2/3 of that from the result of Step 1. (40% is 2/3 of 60%.)
3) Determine which is lower, the amount the AI is willing to pay or the amount from Step 2. Sixty percent of whichever is lower is the most GPT you can ask the AI for.
That way both the human player and the leading AIs end up better off financially than they would without the bug and workaround. It's not a perfect solution, but it provides a way to do GPT deals without completely upsetting the balance or providing an unfair advantage for more, smaller deals compared with fewer, bigger ones. Unfortunately, the calculations involved would be a bit of a pain, and I'm not sure how many AU players would want to go through that kind of hassle.
By the way, my biggest reservation about a rule against accepting GPT payments at all is that I routinely acquire luxuries by trading a tech for a lucury or luxuries plus whatever else I can get. In my second C3C game, I've been trying a self-imposed rule against trades involving GPT, and not being able to ask for GPT as part of my "whatever else" is proving to be very painful.
Nathan
I recognized the problem of getting 50% of an AI's gold in one deal and then 50% of what's left in another before I posted. But between increased purchasing power for the top AIs and decreased gold for humans, such a rule would at least mitigate the bug's damage. Trading two techs and a luxury to get 7/8 of an AI's gold isn't as bad for the AI as getting 8/8 of the AI's gold for a single tech. Also note that the multiplicative effect helps compensate for the fact that if an AI gets full value at half price, that shifts the balance of advantage in the AI's favor.
I came up with another approach that is even more elegant from a technical perspective, but didn't post it earlier because it is tougher to implement. The basic idea would be to sell techs for 60% of what an AI is willing/able to pay and then treat the AI as if the other 40% did not exist for the 20 turns of the deal. Thus, human players would get 20% more gold for their GPT deals than they would under normal rules, while AIs would get to keep 40% of the gold they would have paid. In practical terms, the procedure for a deal would be something like:
1) Find out how much GPT the AI has available. (The transition to "would never accept the deal" marks where an AI doesn't have the GPT to make a deal even if it wanted to.)
2) Calculate the total current GPT the civ is paying you and subtract 2/3 of that from the result of Step 1. (40% is 2/3 of 60%.)
3) Determine which is lower, the amount the AI is willing to pay or the amount from Step 2. Sixty percent of whichever is lower is the most GPT you can ask the AI for.
That way both the human player and the leading AIs end up better off financially than they would without the bug and workaround. It's not a perfect solution, but it provides a way to do GPT deals without completely upsetting the balance or providing an unfair advantage for more, smaller deals compared with fewer, bigger ones. Unfortunately, the calculations involved would be a bit of a pain, and I'm not sure how many AU players would want to go through that kind of hassle.
By the way, my biggest reservation about a rule against accepting GPT payments at all is that I routinely acquire luxuries by trading a tech for a lucury or luxuries plus whatever else I can get. In my second C3C game, I've been trying a self-imposed rule against trades involving GPT, and not being able to ask for GPT as part of my "whatever else" is proving to be very painful.
Nathan
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