I have never (usually play intelligent/bright AI) had the AI sell me ships or starbases for less than all my techs and 1000s of BCs...and that with me having great diplomacy compared to them, and usually warm or friendly attitude. What's your secret?

have never (usually play intelligent/bright AI) had the AI sell me ships or starbases for less than all my techs and 1000s of BCs...and that with me having great diplomacy compared to them, and usually warm or friendly attitude. What's your secret?

I play on bright and the AI does it all the time. I bought a lucky ranger from a race and the next turn attacked him with it. Cost me about 2500 bcs. That's the only ship I've bought but I can often buy starbases as well.

I am playing at normal level and I cannot use this strategy, only works couple of times and then the AI denies me the choice.

I don't know how you guys do it, but for me, trading for the AI's ships and starbases is a super inneficient strategy. They place way too high a value on it, even when I have Jedi level diplomacy. But I'm not complaining, just curous exactly how you guys are getting these supposed 'deals' for their starbases.

I find that in general the AI is pretty bad at noticing that you are setting up to take a bunch of his planets at once. In one game I set things up to take all but one of the Dregins planets in a single turn (it was about 8 or so planets). He should have declared war on me when he saw what was going on, but he just got annoyed (this was with the highest intelligence level).

I don't know how you guys do it, but for me, trading for the AI's ships and starbases is a super inneficient strategy. They place way too high a value on it, even when I have Jedi level diplomacy. But I'm not complaining, just curous exactly how you guys are getting these supposed 'deals' for their starbases.

AI super values some techs, like Medium Scale Building or some of the later logistics techs. With a few techs, you can trade for starbases and you can trade the same techs to multiple races and get a whole bunch of starbases all in one turn.... Stuff like Medium Scale Building should be able to get you 5+ ships from each AI too. If you were just trading to one AI, it wouldnt be a big deal, but in a gigantic universe with all those trade partners..

The diplomacy portion of the AI is flawed, selling techs, buying ships, starbases, bribing it to declare war with someone on the otherside and then hitting it from the back, etc... there are simply waaaay too many things that you can do that he will never expect. Then there's the matter of how much the AI will value their possesions. Some people are saying 2500 BC is a lot, that's a joke. With 2500 BC and some diplomacy, you can buy a well defended and nearly max MINING starbase (for the current tech level) or any of the trade goods that they make. This isn't just a great deal, it's an absolutely sickeningly sweet deal. Is he too militarily powerful? buy that military miner, and suddenly he's weaker and you're stronger. Is his economy too strong? buy his morale and economic miner/trade goods and he suddenly finds himself in trouble while they will make you a ton of money more than what it costs you. Heck, if you really want to cheat, just start trading him money for money. If your diplomacy is higher, you can actually give him less money for more money in return and he'll happily accept. You can then use that money you gain and buy all of his stuff.

Suffice it to say, after discovering how easy it is to slaughter the AI with the diplomatic system, I too consider using diplomacy an exploit, and have made every effort to not use it. No tech trading, no buying, etc. It's more fun this way.

Yeah, I don't use diplomacy either because it just makes the game trivial (give the AI +10000000% bonuses, it doesn't matter)

Reminds me of the CIv3 trading scheme, which was god-awful as well.

Although, the Civ4 trading is extremely well done, makers of GC2 should buy a copy of Civ4 and make notes and maybe beg the makers of Civ4 to give them tips on coding diplomacy and trading.

But for now, I consider diplomacy picks and any type of deals (except for straight up peace deals) to be cheating. I mean come on, the AI should almost never sell a ship, starbase or planet. Actually because of surrendering, the AI should NEVER sell a ship, starbase or planet, period.