Never trade luxury for luxury - instead...

[Ralf]

Never trade luxury for luxury - its stupid. You just replacing a homegrown happiness-boosting luxury in favour of a foreign happiness-boosting luxury. The result? Happiness-related status quo, but with the exception that you now have one less free luxury to play around with in your negotiations.

Instead use excess luxuries to trade foreign techs, strategical resources, and other things. With a small reasonable amount of gold added, in order to sweeten the deal, you can often get very reasonable deals.

[MarshalN]

Actually, no, because if you have more than 1 of the same luxury, it won't do a thing to your happiness. So if you have 4 wines and that's the only luxury you have, it's not a bad idea to trade for ivory, incense, furs, gems, etc etc etc for more happiness. 4 wines mean 3 wines are wasted doing nothing.

[eMarkM]

Marshall is correct. Trade all excess luxs after the first one or they do nothing for you. Most of the time the AI will offer gold/turn. They often won't go lux for lux, at least in my experience, but that's a good trade if you can get it. But gold/turn is fine, you can often crank science up to 100% and still have a positive cash flow going.

e

[Tilemacho]

Actually sometimes it might even be very beneficial......if you have marketplace then the first and second luxuries give only one happy face each, but 3 and 4 give two each....5 and 6 give three and 7 and 8 four!!!

[Ralf]

Originally posted by Tilemacho
Actually sometimes it might even be very beneficial......if you have marketplace then the first and second luxuries give only one happy face each, but 3 and 4 give two each....5 and 6 give three and 7 and 8 four!!!

Oops! How embarrassing - come to think of it - you guys must be right. I was wrong.

[IronSpam]

MarshalN is correct. As long as you're trading excess domestic luxuries for foreign, you come out ahead.

When I first saw the the thread subject, I thought it referred to the fact that you can trade something other than a local resource for a foreign one. In fact, in the games I played, the pattern was that I almost never traded a luxury for a luxury, or strategic resource for the same. It's not that I avoided it, it just turned out that the other side frequently offers a luxury for a good technology I offered up.

Of course, I would assume that this practically guarantees that the other guy will cut off your resource supply at the end of the requisite twenty turns, instead of letting it "float," since there's no per turn payment in exchange. No matter, if you're the tech leader, there will be another opportunity to secure those resources.

[HalfLotus]

The value of a luxury resource is a function of your empire size. If you have more people/cities than the other civ, then the luxury has a greater effect on your civ. This is why the AI wont trade luxuries straight up sometimes.
I dont give luxuries to very large AI, or to a civ that I foresee a war with in the near future. No need to boost their civ before fighting it.
Getting the third, fifth, and seventh luxury is a bonus because of the extra happy faces from a marketplace. Especially that third one!

[Libertarian]

Didn't know that about the marketplaces. Thanks!

Is that documented anywhere?

[HalfLotus]

Only in the civilopedia, I believe.