U can still bribe a race to declare war on another but its really, really expensive. Even the Drengin take huge amounts of money/tech/goods to bribe, so much that I am not willing to pay it and this is when u want them to attack a race who is military rated weakest and they r the strongest. Mining resources r impossible to trade for as well, u can offer everything u have for one and they won't accept. Which means you after blast there starbase to bits instead and get it for free, how stupid, instead of paying the AI's loads to get one, now we just get them for free. Is the game better? No, just means u r less likely to be peaceful.

The problem is people come on this forum and say 'this is cheesy stardock please stop us using those tactics', so stardock nerf trading with the AI's. We only have our selves to blame, for complaining about it!

I think when u set up a game, an option should exist for easy trading/diplomacy (ie. 1.02.x) and another for hard ie 1.1. I miss using diplomacy/trading to my advantage, I never used to exploit it in a cheesy way, just as an expensive alternative to war and now its really been removed from the game to a large extent.

The AI suck on diplomacy, I would like to see it tweaked lot with new feature...

The problem of declaring war.... no one declare war one me, I always have to declare war on them. There is not even the possibility to declare war by a treaty...I'm normally playing at challenging level. Going to try "though" soon...

Genuis and such are found by looking at the race, Intelligent = Tough. You will see the game "tough" on the bottom, but you can mix and match races. You can have a fool race on tough, and you can have one on Intelligent. If you go above Intelligent on the race, your settings, I believe will automatically go one notch up to painful, or whatever it is. It's at the screen where you choose the races that will play gainst you.

I think they put more weight on the military score counter and so the AI are now paranoid to declare war against a stronger enemy you can put everything on the table and there excuse is "there military power is just too strong forget it" even when you are allied with them and have the strongest military.

I have a game where the drath were compleatly surrounded by the Altarians and had a considerable military and they were hostile towards the Altarians I would have given them Galactic Stock Exchanges and Expert Diplomacy plus numerus other things, (Expert Diplomacy has the Galactic Showcase for diplomacy bonus) they still came to me with this same excuse.

Or just demad all the resources they have grabbed within your territory and have them watch as you easily ally with everyone to take them over in an efficient manner, I mainly go to war with someone to test new ship designs not really to win a game as fast as i can with the most brute force I can.

it was too easy to bribe AIs to war or trade for their starbasis in 1.0X and now in 1.1 it is too difficult

War, maybe (I wouldn't know since it's not part of my strategy).

Starbases...they SHOULD be INCREDIBLY expensive.

An economy resource is easily worth 5000BC per turn on large maps. Even 200K would not be expensive for that.

A military resource means nobody has a chance of outgunning you, even if you're lagging behind in military research. It's basically a guaranteed win since the only way the player loses is by conquest.

Morale resource...frees up one square that you were using for an entertainment building. Put a stock exchange on that square and the benefit, whilst not quite as good as an economy resource, is still 1000s of BC per turn.

Research resource...not as effective as a military resource, but it's still ALMOST a "no lose" card for the player. You're pretty much guaranteed the tech lead against everybody unless you're playing "Incredible" AIs.

You don't find those difficulty levels, but it shouldn't be hard to figure out that if he says he's playing genius, that he means computer players set on genius. And that would mean he's playing at crippling level, in case you were wondering

Thank you, that is indeed what I meant.

It's probably true that AIs being nearly impossible to bribe is due to changes to tech trading and some more weight on the military scores. But wouldn't it be nice if the AI would be able to differ when you're trying to trade techs and when you're *giving* techs away for a war they'd most likely win. Right now it's impossible to even pay off the Korx to attack Torians, even when the Korx happen to be have the strongest military in the galaxy and Torians have merely average.

True, it was too easy to bribe races in the past but now the balance has gone another way. I'm all for having AI that is more picky on what techs it gives and what it wants in exchance but come on, you should still be able to "persuade" the computer to fight against an inferior race without having to give away half of your kingdom...

Actually, I've had the AI on Suicidal wipe me off the map with a rush of tiny ships (hundreds of them) without regard for the two fully developed military resources I had control of, or the medium sized battleship fleets I had patrolling all of my planets.