Stop AI Civs trading tech with each other... can we do this?

Does this happen in high difficulty levels? I still play on a low difficulty level and frankly the AI players don't trade techs often with each other. They do most of the research on their own.

Why would you want em to stop? The ai should have the same options as a human player. If you dont want certain techs spreading, dont share em.

BlizzardGR, they tend to trade alot more later. Generally they dont have enough cash or tech to trade on earlier levels of difficulty

There is allways the hard way..

Manually blast the living daylights out of their trade routes, Blockade their planets and make them beg for your mercy.

when all AIs are intelligent it gets a bit out of hand. it seems sometimes they just all work together to defeat the human player. as they dont "cheat" the hardway at that AI level it must be cause of them trading between each other. else I cant explain why they have 20+ more techs than me shortly after the game started. ^^

There is allways the hard way.. Manually blast the living daylights out of their trade routes, Blockade their planets and make them beg for your mercy.

u can blockade a civilization positioning ships near their planets, so they can't trade or exchange tech anymore?

I don't seem to have a problem in my game set to intellegent. i'm leading in most areas and thats with me heavly concentreaing on military most of the game.

u can blockade a civilization positioning ships near their planets, so they can't trade or exchange tech anymore?

No

Here's the scenario -

Gigantic galaxy, 9 AIs all on intelligent.
Within the 1st few turns if you meet a minor race talk with them, note they have one or none techs ahead of you.

Normaly within a few turns a major race's scout ships will show up. Check the minor race again. They now have magicly gained 6 or 7 techs ahead of you.

Play on - once you have 3 or 4 major races talk with them all, note what techs they have (that you dont). In almost all cases they have an identical tech list.

Check the debug logs - every single turns you will see that the AIs just share everything without evaluation or weight. ie you routinely see things like "X race trades basic beam weapons for Armor IV with race Y". Yeah see if ANY race will give you that kind of deal

Research a tech that no AI has, trade it to an AI. Check within a turn or 2, pretty much all AIs will have it.

There seems to be some limits like not trading to someone the AI is at war with, but in a large world with 9 AIs this is totaly pointless as they just trade everything right away to the rest .... who then in the same turn trade it to the others anway.

It defeats the whole pre-release hype about needing to design ships that target different races tech weaknesses - hmmm, they all have the same techs. There is NO specialization, the AI just share one giant tech pool Which does make it harder on the player ... but I thought this AI wasnt supposed to cheat? *grin*

The issue is really not that the AI trades techs, thats a good thing. Its just that they do it habitualy without balance or value to the techs. They give away higher level techs for low level ones without thought (to other AIs). They dont keep anything back that would give them an edge.

While we'd like to see a blanket "no tech trading" option in the game setup fixing the basic AI flaws would be even better

Myros

My first couple of games were played on "Painful" with 9 opponents (but not the dregin ). About 30 turns into the game the "share techs" UP council decision came up. They decided to share 2 "unique" techs with everyone. Well, what happened then was a storm of tech for me. I got about 20 free techs, because you get all the prereq's as well. Suddenly I realized just how the AI was trading tech, and resolved never to trade any defensive, diplomatic, or weapon techs with it again.

Suffice to say, it does make things challenging. Though its good because it also makes the computer opponent predictible. It will tend to stick with the weapon and defense path it sets early on, and if it shares tech then most races will have similar weapons and defenses. This is a serious advantage to the human player that can now fight homogenous enemies and can take advantage of one wep and defense line against all enemies. At least until late game, anyway.

The issue is really not that the AI trades techs, thats a good thing. Its just that they do it habitualy without balance or value to the techs. They give away higher level techs for low level ones without thought (to other AIs). They dont keep anything back that would give them an edge.

They do it for the player too. When I'm trading techs and they wont give me the one I want (usually very high level or military ish) I just wait until they offer it to me, and I get it for far better then when I initiate the bartering.

Trading techs is VERY nice, because when you're playing with multiple (5-9) AIs, you can stay ahead of all of them in techs and cash simply by trading with all of them. For example, if one of the AIs has a tech you want but you have nothing to trade for it, go trade with the other races until you get something he'll accept. Using this I'm able to stay ahead of the AI in terms of techs on normal diff.

when all AIs are intelligent it gets a bit out of hand. it seems sometimes they just all work together to defeat the human player. as they dont "cheat" the hardway at that AI level it must be cause of them trading between each other. else I cant explain why they have 20+ more techs than me shortly after the game started. ^^

No offense, but maybe the computer just plays better than you on Intelligent? (No shame in that, the AI beat Frogboy in Intelligent, too).

I play on Intelligent, and I haven't won a game yet. But it NEVER felt like the AI was unfairly ganging up on me. Not once.

Incidentally, it was confirmed that the AI DOESN'T ACTUALLY KNOW whether they're dealing with a player or another AI. So if they're trading more techs than you are, that's simply because they're making better offers.

*Warning* Reading the following strategy may make the game less fun, you have been warned.
*End Warning*








Currently, because of this 'feature', I have reversed it and turned it completely to my advantage. Every turn a check each race to see if they got a new tech, and if they do I buy it. I think go and sell it to every single other race in that same turn. This does 2 things

1) I am always technologically equal or superior to everyone (I don't trade techs I research myself, I know other people won't be trading them)

2) I am filthy rich. By a single tech for 250, sell it 4-7x for 350+ (I use massive diplomancy bonuses to enhance to effect).

I don't have to charge taxes. I am always at 100% industrial output. At any point I can drop research funding to 0% and still never fall behind in techs.

This doesn't feel right, hence my warning above. I think it might be ruining my games. This strategy works better and better the more races there are on a map, it won't work at all 1v1 (and has some trouble if everyone starts dying, but by then I have this huge savings account).

The problem, as I've noted before, and which the devs have admitted to, is a specific behavior subroutine regarding tech trading where an AI controlled race randomly will offer a good trade to another race. Presumably the idea was so that the player would sometimes get a deal (Oh, look the Drengin want to give me Advanced Hulls for Sensors. Pwns! I love this game!!!!). Of course, it becomes clear that this idea was not very well thought out, since it directly runs contrary to the dev's much-hyped practice of not having the AI races differentiate between the player race and the other AI races. Since this behavior is randomized, and since each AI is more likely to initiate trades for tech than the player, then the result is that the variability in tech becomes exponentially more homogeneous the more races in your universe.

This can be easily seen if you play with just one race: You get the advantage, as the AI race will sometimes give you a good deal out of the blue, and you can be as stingy as you want. In short, the tech trading model in GalCiv2 is optimized for 1 vs 1 games. The more races you add, then the more often that unbalanced trades will be proposed between AI races. At a certain number of races (my guess is 4 or 5), the number of proposed unbalanced trades exceeds the number of techs separating the highest and lowest AI race, after which all AI races effectively have the same techs.

Of course, as has also been noted, the player can then choose to exploit this behavior by constantly initiating trades with all races and acting as a broker, thereby beating the other races to the punch and reaping the tech and financial rewards which come from being the middleman.

IMO both results are unfun and unsatisfactory, since I must choose between a game in which the AI cheats me or I cheat the AI, which is precisely what the devs claim they are fighting against. This and the combat system (don't get me started) are the two reasons I am quickly souring on this game.

I noticed the change at bright difficulty level. Yes, it is annoying, but all strat games do this. Perhaps AI's should be less willing to trade unequally with each other- or tech trading should mostly occur with races that are behind in the tech tree.

The other way is annoying, and I'd probably rate this behavior as the most annoying thing about the AI right now.

combat system (don't get me started)

What about?

All I know is ... to me this is the biggest aggravation in the game right now. And I'm very unsatisfied with the AI trading tech like it does right now.

I'm sorry but tech's shouldn't be traded very often.. and the AI trading with itself will always equalize itself out short of wars. So that the races all have the tech.

Yet if it was fair.. they would be offering to trade with you as well. Yet you'll notice they don't very often. Yet when they get new tech, they trade it with each other so that in one turn they all will have that new tech, including the minor races.

And as one player put it.. why care about the Frogboy hyped Beam/Missile/Gun balancing tool. When the AI will trade that tech to someone else no questions asked.

And if I had my way right now.. I would make it so that only friendly relations with a race allow for trade. Anything else, and it ruins the game experience. Don't believe me? Well there are many silent folks out there just getting unhappy because they try to research technologies, and their enemies all have 6-7 more than them. All the time.

Seriously.. Brad/Draginol/Frogboy. Please fix this. It's NOT fun.

It would be like the United States giving out Aegis Cruiser technology to Madagascar. Who then will sell it to anyone, for any other tech.

Yet that state secret was stolen by the Chinese. So explain to me again where races who are wary of each other are out there, sharing technology left and right with big competitors.

No really.. please just get this fixed by the next weeks patch. Tune it so that only friendly or better trade techs. And then you would make it fair. And hell they shouldn't trade tech's all the time then either.. it should be 10-20 turns between checking.

I agree, I really dislike it as it completly takes away from each race being distinct over the course of the game.

One good thing about it though is that it is incredibly easy to counter the AI's navy. I have found that once they go down a line of weapon techs (usually beam for some reason) they dont tend to equip ships with different types of weapons. So i just pop on some missles and deflectors and there my navy is more powerful with 1/3rd the ships. But this also leads to HAVING to keep research up in those weapons techonologies and not trade them at all.

Also it leads to 2/3rds of the defense line being unneeded. And 1/3rd of the weapons technology almost never researched.

First time post.

This topic prompted me to post to the forum since I'm also of the belief that something *needs* to
be done about the tech trading algorithms.

I have only played on "intelligent", but at this level, the AI's simple trade way too often. Basically, every race,
including the minor races have everything. It really detracts from the game.

I don't think races should stop trading, because that is realistic and does add to the game. Here is another
idea that might fix things:

The trading algorithm should be modified so that the trade value of the tech is heavily modified by the relations between the two races making the trade . It should be done in a way that if two races don't like each other or are merely "neutral", then trades between them are not likely to happen. This could be modified by things like how
much time has passed since the last time an AI traded, whether they are each in war with a common enemy, etc.

If nothing else is done, a setting to turn off AI trading, or limit AI trading (i.e. AI's may only trade 1 tech every X
turns) should be added.

Overall, great game except for a few bugs.

After a while you realise that you can take advantage of the tech trading yourself and cheat the ai in it instead. A good strategy is deciding what tech line(s) you want to specialize in and keeping those techs for yourself while trading all the other techs.

This is what good players are doing alredy, now it's time the ai start doing the same. I't should try to keep some techs for itself no matter what, not trading it to humans nor other ai:s. Unless the tech is "compromised" and someone else researched it, then they can trade it freely.

But a tech should also get lower and lower trading worth to the ai the more people who have it... so that if one other person has a tech and wants to trade it, its considered much more valuable then when you are the last person receiving it from a "tech pimp". If that's not enough there might also be need for a limit on tech trading to 1 per turn or something. Then you can't sell the same tech you got from someone else to the whole galaxy for killer profits, wich is kinda cheesy atm.

Not only does it make the idea of specialization a joke, but it seriously undermines the value of research bonuses.

Of course reseach bonuses are not working correctly anyway...

Some of the claims here seem pretty exaggerated.

1) AI do not trade their tech to every other civ immediately (or near-immediately). This is particularly noticeable when I have a tech lead in the late game and a new minor civ shows up with all my techs, yet those techs still stay pretty much exlusive to me and them. Also if you looked more closely, certain AIs also seem to be shunned and never really get the techs in each game.
2) Building on the above, the AI will often refuse to trade military techs to civs that are already really powerful for many turns. I know because I was on the receiving end of this treatment several times in my last game, including at the very beginning!
3) I believe some other game tried that reduce tech value as more civs have the tech. I think it was called Civ 3.
4) Keep in mind any nerfs to trading is a nerf to diplomacy especially since even when I have around +150% more diplomacy than every other race, it still magically costs me more to buy a tech than I get from selling a tech.

This is with Intelligent AI.

I'd also like to see a solution to this -- preferably an option or scenario to completely disallow trading technology. For a quick fix, even a scenario with permanent war would work: something like the Human Drengin Wars scenario but with multiple opponents.

1) AI do not trade their tech to every other civ immediately (or near-immediately). This is particularly noticeable when I have a tech lead in the late game and a new minor civ shows up with all my techs, yet those techs still stay pretty much exlusive to me and them. Also if you looked more closely, certain AIs also seem to be shunned and never really get the techs in each game

They may not do it immediately or even near-immediately, but they do trade a lot more than what makes an enjoyable game. At the beginning of the game, I find myself needing to trade tech so often that for every tech I research myself, I get several from trading. For the most part, I would prefer to research at least one tech myself for every one tech that I get from trading.

Researching technology is a major portion of the game. Looking through all the available techs and deciding which of them is the most useful is one of the largest ways to make it feel like you own your empire. I want to have to decide whether researching Laser IV to give me an edge in combat is more important than researching xeno industry to give myself a manufacturing bonus. That's one of the most important ways I feel like I'm playing the game. If I can research either Laser IV or Xeno Industry, then trade whichever I researched to Player 2 for the other, and then trade those two techs to Players 3 and 4 for more technology still, that means that my choice in research doesn't matter, and that is a major turnoff

2) I am filthy rich. By a single tech for 250, sell it 4-7x for 350+ (I use massive diplomancy bonuses to enhance to effect).

What is the difficulty setting? Be aware that trading tech for money isn't very profitable at a higher AI level

The trading algorithm should be modified so that the trade value of the tech is heavily modified by the relations between the two races making the trade . It should be done in a way that if two races don't like each other or are merely "neutral", then trades between them are not likely to happen. This could be modified by things like how

Well, don't forget that the human player can initiate trade exchange every turn with nearly everyone he is at peace While the AI couldn't do the same thing? Not to mention that giving tech is a way to increase standing or avoid war declaration. I am not sure how relation evolves if you are trade a powerful tech against a weak one. It must surely be considered as if you have given a free tech.