Originally posted by Pyrkaige
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I doubt the AI involved in trading even has a concept about trading for the value of a single unit; it bases trades on the future usefulness of the tech/resource involved. This is a totally different concept from deciding "what do I build now?" which is what it does when determining whether to build another spearman, or a temple instead. The reason why the AI trades for workers is because "It wants its people back"; that has no relevance when dealing with military units from another civ.
If you look at the possible tradeable items that a civ has at any given time, the truly viable ones (not cities or gold by itself unless involved in another, larger trade) rarely amount to more than half a dozen: a tech or two and perhaps a resource, and some luxuries. If you toss military units into the mix, you're talking about potentially hundreds of trades for each civ in the game, every turn. The logistics of this would be something of a nightmare to factor in every turn.
In short, I hope this is added for MP usage, but I doubt there is very much chance it would be available for standard singleplayer games.
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I doubt the AI involved in trading even has a concept about trading for the value of a single unit; it bases trades on the future usefulness of the tech/resource involved. This is a totally different concept from deciding "what do I build now?" which is what it does when determining whether to build another spearman, or a temple instead. The reason why the AI trades for workers is because "It wants its people back"; that has no relevance when dealing with military units from another civ.
If you look at the possible tradeable items that a civ has at any given time, the truly viable ones (not cities or gold by itself unless involved in another, larger trade) rarely amount to more than half a dozen: a tech or two and perhaps a resource, and some luxuries. If you toss military units into the mix, you're talking about potentially hundreds of trades for each civ in the game, every turn. The logistics of this would be something of a nightmare to factor in every turn.
In short, I hope this is added for MP usage, but I doubt there is very much chance it would be available for standard singleplayer games.
As far as complexity of trades, (i.e. hundreds of trades for each civ in the game) isn't that what we want -- complexity? And one doesn't have to factor in every turn what trades the AI has conducted each turn, you deal with situations, no one gets a perfect knowledge of every trade that has occured.
And if there are so many choices you can't click through every possible combination to get the best deal, then that's good too. That's called a satisficing deal in economics, there may have been the perfect deal somewhere, but it is too much trouble to find, so you pick the one the most closely resembles what you want.
In short, I have no intention of playing MP, and want unit trading in the single player version.
Anyway, I pounded this response out pretty fast and haven't re-read it, so please don't take offense. I think it's an interesting discussion.
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