[PB78] Underdogs and undercats: The Mrrshan warlords visit the world of Civ IV

[thrawn]

Seriously thought about taking the deal but decided against it. These are SD's oldest cities including the first barb city he flipped, his military is lower than ours, and most importantly I'm last to play this turn so I can declare immediately and move in and recapture our cities before he gets any whipped units out.

However the cost would still be very high, it's doubtful how well we can hold his cities, and most importantly it would take SD out of contention and I want a strong SD until Magic and Dreylin are brought down. So while it would be a most amusing twist to the game, I believe it would ruin our win chances and so is not worth it. But if it were Magic making a similar offer, I'd absolutely have gone for it.

[T-hawk]

I'm sure that deal wasn't intended to be accepted. We usually have rules against city gifting so that someone can't just throw a game or kingmake. I don't know what he means by it though.

[xist10]

We usually have rules against city gifting

And this mean, we shouldn't allow this type of deals at all.
If you send a deal, this deal should be allowed.

[Mjmd]

Usually the cities are included to stress that it isn't a public deal (as the person knows you can't accept them). That may or may not be the case here. Sometimes the cities can try to message intentions in an area ect. To me this is perfectly fine and is just a way of using the AI diplo. 

Again, unsure if this is what SD meant, but recently Pin proposed luxury metal for luxury metal deals as a way to indicate they would be open to doing loans. Especially with SD it could mean many other things as well.

[shallow_thought]

SD sent me an offer I'm not sure how to interpret:

Now, that is a _usual_ experience for MP at RB (judging from threads in other games).

And yes, do not accept: that would be considered very bad manners indeed.

[thrawn]

Does it make sense to keep research at around break even instead of binary to mask the teching rate in case there may be a race? I don't have any booster buildings comings and the extra beaker that's going to be lost to rounding won't bring the tech forward and is small change at this point.

[Cyneheard]

Does it make sense to keep research at around break even instead of binary to mask the teching rate in case there may be a race? I don't have any booster buildings comings and the extra beaker that's going to be lost to rounding won't bring the tech forward and is small change at this point.

So there's two theoretical ways a player could find our your research rate:

- GNP tracking through graphs/the Demographics screen.
- Espionage getting research visibility. I don't think there's been enough EPs spent for that to be a real possibility.

For the first one, it's possible the 20% or 40% pre-req bonus is notable, but keep in mind it's not 100% of that as you're not teching at 100%, and Culture always makes understanding precise GNP figures complicated. For the second one, binary hides your rate for a couple turns until you turn it on at 100%.

[xist10]

Like Cyneheard implied, Break even is worse to mask the teching rate. With currency, this changes a bit, but still there are no practical reasons to not research binary.
I knew of a few players, who did 10/90 or even 20/80 in a game. But this was because they didn't want to create more panic from their dominant GNP that they tried to "reduce" it this way.

[thrawn]

We just discovered currency (first to) so they'll be able to see how much we make and how much we lose with binary and will know exactly. Which is why I'm thinking that around break even they'll only see the total gnp where it's less clear. I'd like to be first to CoL but also to make a detour and am concerned that Magic can beat us in that case.

[thrawn]

Question - Magic asked me to trade health resource for health resource but I'd rather trade to him for gpt. So what are the usual prices? It adds 1f in each city that needs it so would it be 1-2 gpt per such city?