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You should not always give up on a trade when the AI informs you that "It can't be done." Let me provide a two examples:
1) Near the end of my 2nd tournament game when I asked an AI to trade for the last tech I needed to complete my spaceship, I got this news, but I wanted Laser pretty bad, and got it by doing the following.
a) I increased my income per turn to the maximum, allowing the AI to believe that I could pay more per turn than originally thought. Alone, this was not enough, but by fiddling with lump sum and per turn payments, I changed "can't" into "close to a deal".
b) Then I moved all my workers into my capitol and added them to the deal, and bingo, it was "acceptable." Always the miser, I was even able to shave about 100 gold off the lump sum part of it.
c) If this had not been an OCC game, I could also have added a city or two into the deal (maybe this only works, pre-patch though), but workers were enough here. Other ingredients that may tip the scales would be diplomatic arrangements, such as MPP's, etc.
The point is that when this message appears, not all options have been considered by he or she who confidently utters "it can't be done".
2) At times during my first tournament game, while scanning the map and noticing AI cities centered on clusters of luxuries, it occurred to me that I might like to own these cities. Of course any proposed trade in this regard elicited "It can't be done", but I was top dog in that game in power and culture, so:
Using the active window I put the always present peace treaty up for renegotiation, adding the desired city to the pot, and added a good dash of a few thousand gold, maybe a luxury or resource or two, and suddenly the impossible deal worked and that coveted cluster of incense was mine to enjoy and offer for trade to make even more gold to repeat the process on another luxury or resource-rich AI city.
So I ask, why bother to fight when deals like this "can't be done"?
3) Now if you have zero gold, no workers, no income and are in anarchy, and just about everyone has declared war against you and they say "it can't be done", it's a safe bet it probably can't, but check around a bit first, and make absolutely sure!
1) Near the end of my 2nd tournament game when I asked an AI to trade for the last tech I needed to complete my spaceship, I got this news, but I wanted Laser pretty bad, and got it by doing the following.
a) I increased my income per turn to the maximum, allowing the AI to believe that I could pay more per turn than originally thought. Alone, this was not enough, but by fiddling with lump sum and per turn payments, I changed "can't" into "close to a deal".
b) Then I moved all my workers into my capitol and added them to the deal, and bingo, it was "acceptable." Always the miser, I was even able to shave about 100 gold off the lump sum part of it.
c) If this had not been an OCC game, I could also have added a city or two into the deal (maybe this only works, pre-patch though), but workers were enough here. Other ingredients that may tip the scales would be diplomatic arrangements, such as MPP's, etc.
The point is that when this message appears, not all options have been considered by he or she who confidently utters "it can't be done".
2) At times during my first tournament game, while scanning the map and noticing AI cities centered on clusters of luxuries, it occurred to me that I might like to own these cities. Of course any proposed trade in this regard elicited "It can't be done", but I was top dog in that game in power and culture, so:
Using the active window I put the always present peace treaty up for renegotiation, adding the desired city to the pot, and added a good dash of a few thousand gold, maybe a luxury or resource or two, and suddenly the impossible deal worked and that coveted cluster of incense was mine to enjoy and offer for trade to make even more gold to repeat the process on another luxury or resource-rich AI city.
So I ask, why bother to fight when deals like this "can't be done"?
3) Now if you have zero gold, no workers, no income and are in anarchy, and just about everyone has declared war against you and they say "it can't be done", it's a safe bet it probably can't, but check around a bit first, and make absolutely sure!