Some things to ponder..

[Prince]

As everyone, I'm sorry if this has already been brought up many times before.

1) Being the Chinese, I was at war with the Romans to the south of me, and I pretty much 'laid the smack down on 'em'. They had a bunch of small cities left, and I couldn't bother finishing the job, so I offered them peace for a couple of cities. My trade advisor told me we were close to a deal here, so I thought I'd add a tech or 2 and that'd be good. But as soon as I added *anything* at all to the deal on my side, they would never accept the deal. This is silly, I mean, peace for 2 cities? Cool. Peace + Chemistry for 2 cities? No way! This can't have gone unnoticed to all of you, but I thought I'd make sure.

2) Isn't it a bit strange that the AI somehow manages to find all the islands on the map where it can colonize, yet it never has to sail the seas for it or runs into other civs on the way? In the same game as above, I'm playing on a continents map with 60% water. There's 2 huge continents, and 2 clusters of small islands. Somehow all the civs managed to populate the islands, but I have their world maps and it shows a connection straight from their continent to the islands, and no other explored areas at sea. They also had never met the civs on the other continent before, and they too had colonized some small islands without knowing anything else of the map. This is a bit strange to me, how do they know where all the islands are, and if they don't, why do I never see 'searched areas' on their world maps?

I wish I could do that; saves me a lot of trouble. There's a lot of water, y'know

3) I'm sure there was a 3 but I can't think of it right now. Perhaps later.

[Jaybe]

1) You cannot trade anything other than peace for cities. This was deemed too exploitable and was implemented many patches ago.

2) YOU can even risk your galleys in treacherous waters. The AI never does that. I often find islands (or even small continents) before the AI. I suspect it just happened to occur on the map you are playing.

[Qilue]

Concerning 2)

The AI doesn't need your map. In a recent game, I hadn't yet traded my map to another civ and I had an as-yet-not-colonized southern part of the continent I was on. The two civs on the northern part of the continent had galleys going along the coast on their way to the south. However, when I had placed cities so there was no room left, both these galleys turned around. I still hadn't traded my word map to them.

Moral - trading world maps is only for your benefit, the AI already knows what the map looks like along with the location of "ALL" resources, even those it doesn't have the tech for.

[Prince]

Originally posted by Qilue
Moral - trading world maps is only for your benefit, the AI already knows what the map looks like along with the location of "ALL" resources, even those it doesn't have the tech for.

So it wasn't a coincidence after all when all the piles of sulphur suddenly appeared within the borders of annoying size-1-no-chance cities.

[Zero-Tau]

Originally posted by Prince


So it wasn't a coincidence after all when all the piles of sulphur suddenly appeared within the borders of annoying size-1-no-chance cities.

No, it wasn't. Actually, the knowledge of the AI can be used to your own advantage. If the AI settles in tundra or desert or somewhere equally bad, and the city isn't right next to the AI's territory, then it probably has a future resource, thus making it a good target for a nice, quick war...

One more thing: The AI is very protective of it's future resources. This means that in peace talks, they'll sometimes refuse to give away a small, apparently useless city, but they'll be willing to give you a city that's bigger, more productive, and farther away from your territory. If this happens, the small, useless city probably has control of a future resource. If you can afford it, you might want to cancel peace talks and snatch the city.