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Quote:I can pinpoint that one. The interface failure is that there's no summary to see what *you* can offer *them*. If you're looking for opportunities to trade away a surplus resource or unimportant tech for whatever you can get, you must work the diplo tables yourself until you see a good opportunity.
There are several mods on civfanatics that provide a different diplomacy screen that summarizes the information in a much better manner. (No new info, but it is all there without you having to click around to see it all).
There is also a mod that gives 'event messages' (like the ones you get when a great person is born somewhere), when trading opportunities open up, such as when someone has an extra resources, or over threshold gpt or raw gold. I do not think it does techs, but I'm sure it could. This would be my prefered solution, if Firaxis liked the idea.
Quote:Does anybody know if the AIs distinguish between types of demands? In my game, I've asked for (and received) a trade embargo against Qin from Hatty. Does the AI simply convert the value of a demand into a specific internal currency, gold for example?
It seems to me that every demand/trade is converted to some raw commerce/gold number, including war and peace. I suspect that each type can have some modifier for each personality (I saw a chart somewhere with all the modifiers of every civ, maybe I can find it again).
Onto the main topic, it seems to me, that if you have very good relations with a civ, you are likely to get one requested gift from them, if it is not too large a request. So, you might get 500 gold, or a tech thats about 500 beakers, etc. I suspect its more a formula based on your diplomatic relations than a dice roll, but I have no direct evidence. It does seem like you get only one thing every 200 turns or so (from each civ). (Most diplomatic events have a x turns until they are forgotten, I assume this is the same).
Quote:It may be particular to being this far behind in tech and economy, creating what seems like a high instance of acceptance.
I do think this is a factor, just like it was in the Rome vs Barbarians deity game. It may even be the opposite end of the 'we think you are too advanced' scale. Certainly that seems the case when the AIs start spontaneously gifting techs. (In Epic4, Gandhi flat out gifted me things without a request much more often than me actually asking for something).
Quote:technically speaking, the best thing to be doing is asking over and over, to be sure to get your share of the freebies
I am fairly certain you can only get one requested gift per x number of turns (100, 200, or 300 most likely). So, once you get an accepted gift, no point in asking that civ for another for a long long time.
Quote:Had I chosen Alpha instead I would most likely lost the game when Hatty attacked me.
Take a look at my game. You are probably a better player than me, so you would have won, it was just a whole lot harder!
Quote:Choosing your thread to post my thoughts was not meant to aim anything at you. I can do this in somebody else's thread next time, if you would prefer.
You can do it in my thread! It makes me feel important!  The more people pointing out how many horrible decisions I made the better!
-Iustus
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About requesting gifts/tribute, I've read somewhere that each AI keeps a "pool" of how much they are willing to give you. This pool gets increased every turn, based on your relations and gets decreased (or reset to 0?) every time you make a request, even if the request is denied.
I've just did a few quick tests of this theory and it appears to work. Loading a nearby save I was able to get 50$ from Saladin and 10$ from Quin (all their available cash). However, if I got 10$ from Saladin and asked him for another 10$ right away, I got nothing the second time. If I asked Quin for a tech, he refused, and would refuse any request I made after that. However, after loading a fresh save, I was able to get 10$ from Quin, wait several turns and get another 10$.
So the theory of a pool that is reduced for every request seems to be correct. This means that there is a deterministic (although very complicated) formula for how much you can get and asking every turn is a sure way to get nothing.
As for "we feel you could use these" gifts, these seem to depend only on how far behind you are technologically and how much AIs like you. I got these gifts only on Deity, when I was a couple eras behind the AIs. As I saw in Epic 4, these gifts have nothing to do with how much AI is willing to give in response to your requests. (Gandhi was refusing every request for Alphabet, but gave me some industrial age tech saying "you could use this".) With these gifts there seems to be as much randomness as with other diplomatic proposals, because they don't seem to repeat when reloading a previous save in private games.
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Hi,
microbe Wrote:My firefox displays the pictures correctly. I'm not sure what kind of filters you are using. Same here. I use firefox and Adblock, and have no troubles. Maybe those of you who have troubles have trained Adblock with filters that are too general (the filter "*ad*" sure is too general...)?
-Kylearan
There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better." - John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider
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Iustus Wrote:There is also a mod that gives 'event messages' (like the ones you get when a great person is born somewhere), when trading opportunities open up, such as when someone has an extra resources, or over threshold gpt or raw gold. I do not think it does techs, but I'm sure it could. This would be my prefered solution, if Firaxis liked the idea.
Yuck. This is one of the worst possible mods I've heard about. A program that tells you when and how to make trades? I can't think of anything that would kill my enjoyment faster. So much for actually having to THINK about diplomacy. "Mansa Musa has 2gpt available! Quick, go trade him something for it!" 
Firaxis would adopt such a mod only over my dead body. 
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Hi,
Sullla Wrote:Yuck. This is one of the worst possible mods I've heard about. A program that tells you when and how to make trades? I can't think of anything that would kill my enjoyment faster. Hm. Why's that? It does not tell you what deal you should make, or when. It only informs you about what deals are available every turn, without qualifying them in any way. It's like clicking F4 every turn and going through all the slow and badly designed GUI interfaces by hand, which I do in critical phases of the game (and which I absolutely hate). This is not strategy but a GUI misconception in my view, and if there's a mod correcting that design, I'd love to use that. The decision what to trade when is still up to the player.
As an analogy, you also get event messages about enemy units seen in your territory. In case of the landing display bug, these event messages are critical to counter a bad part of the GUI (that causes landings not to show), so why not do the same for the trading GUI? (This assumes the mod does not come with predefined thresholds like "only report gpt if it's more than x" - I don't know and do not use this mod)
-Kylearan
There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better." - John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider
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T-hawk Wrote:I can pinpoint that one. The interface failure is that there's no summary to see what *you* can offer *them*. If you're looking for opportunities to trade away a surplus resource or unimportant tech for whatever you can get, you must work the diplo tables yourself until you see a good opportunity.
Now, I am only about 80% sure about this, but I believe that if you go into the the foreign advisor screen, go to the 'Resources' tab, and then click on a foreign leaders head, it will change the screen to his perscpective. I.E., it will show you the resources you have that he could use. This works the same as it does on the 'Relations' tab.
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I'm sure most people already know about that feature, but its good for people that don't. The problem is that its very counter-intuitive. I really don't want to have to click on 7~10 leaderheads a turn if i'm playing on a larger map. Its particularly annoying if you want to know when your tech monopoly on a certain tech ends, so that you can trade it around, or any other scenario like that. Its just time consuming and annoying to be forced through that interface, and I believe that is what T-Hawk is refering to. Although clicking on leader heads through the trade screen is much better than opening up the trade windows with each individual Civ, but still, there should be a better way.
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Well, I've played most of my games (of course not the RB events ) with Ruff's cobbled SG mod. It changes some of the interface misdesigns, such as the technology screen: You exactly see what you can offer every other Civ and what they can give instead. Added to that you can see which techs the other Civs can research - very valuable for critical techs like Liberalism. It does not give actually new or hidden information, it just makes the approach to it much more easier - all the information at first glance. I like that feature very much and wouldn't like to miss it.
As for the trade messages: They come from the Civ4lerts mod, which is included in the cobbled SG mod. It tells you when other Civs have researched new techs they are willing to trade (but not what techs) or have a new amount of gold available for trade. And it warns when cities come to their happinness and health limits and if you're close to domination conditions. This mod can be turned off in the main .ini-file if one doesn't like it, as can be done with every other one.
There may be players who enjoy clicking on every leaderhead in the screen during their turns to see interesting trades, as there are players who enjoy heavy micro-managing in general. For me using the mod and the new GUI is just making play more comfortable and thus more enjoyable.
I guess we are quite hi-jacking this thread, so I'm ending this post with a compliment to Sulla for a well played game and a well written report.
Imhotep
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And don't blame me for these mods, I just cobbled them together. They are actually in the HOF mod over at CFanatics. You can also set the gold threashold.
The warning I like is when you get the population threashold warning just after you have settled your first city ... "you are 75% of the world's population which is over the domination threshold".
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