Odd, I've had no real trouble. The AI's a little tougher, sure, but I've been able to make plenty of mutually helpful trades under the new patch. Early game it's hard to pry much out of them, but then that's just sensible.

Its much stingier in 1.5x...I definitely notice this. Your "incredible ability in diplomacy "gives you..well, not much. Youd need to really be over the top in your diplo ability to trade for medium range or higher techs now...and you wont be seeing many "sweetheart deals", even from your treaties (though there are still exploits...wait til an economic boom event and see what you can get for your economic treaty...its like christmas...the korath gave me all of their protected techs and their full compliment of ten sporeships). Ive also noticed that the AI wont outright "sell" techs very easily, except for absurd amounts now...youre almost always going to need to pony up some good tech in return , with a bunch of money on top.


All in all, its probably a good thing as diplomacy has always been cheesy, and is how people beat suicidal difficulty, which shouldnt really be winnable if its working right. The only thing is, the AI seems to trade just as prolifically amongst istelf as it ever did, though its even harder for the player to pick up tech. This makes it more appealing than ever to disable tech trading in the game all together.


Strangely though, its still dirt cheap (relatively speaking) to spam player sponsored wars all over the place. This doesnt seem right to me. With a third to half of the diplo tree completed and diplotrans (showcase too if you can swing it), wars cost about 1500-2000 cash to start, compared to ungodly sums for non protected medium grade techs (you can forget buying any weapon tech outside of the earliest tiers or any of the protecteds).


I would also like to see it easier to pry colonization techs from the AI. On the top three hardest difficulties, the absurd reseach rate the AI has makes reseaching the time intensive colony tech not only impractical to research, but downright dangerous to spend time on...and the AI essentially has them all from the beginning. If I dont get them through invasion or a cheesy treaty trade, I dont get them at all, effectively removing them from the players scope of play....which is no fun.

The problem is, they're not really making the AI that much smarter--only making Suicidal unwinnable. There's a difference.

Well, its difficult to quantify...like I said the AI *seems* to trade just as prolifically amongst itself as ever, while its tougher for me. As I play most of my games on Obscene anymore, this could simply be a factor of them having the "Huge Buttloads of Cash" (tm) and tech to trade that they do. Maybe the situation is further exacerbated by the possibility that the AI is aware it has all that money and is smart enough to know it doesnt really need my money. I dont know what the AIs capabilities are in this area.

Regardless, Im closer than ever to joining the "disable tech trading" crowd....were it not for a few remaining cheesy tactics and my fear of just being totally overun by runaway AI tech bonuses on the higher levels...as its clearly becoming more of a liability than a boon.




Well, this is always kind of the idea I got from Brad....that he'd like suicidal to be all but unwinnable...the warp 10...an unreachable standard that served to uncover weaknesses and exploits in the game. Seeing as he seems to frequently make changes to the game to directly address what people are doing to win the game on that difficulty.

The diplomacy nerfs in the patch certainly made it closer to being so...but player sponsored wars still need addressed. Not only should they be much tougher to outright buy, there should be a cooldown period in between wars(like there is with any diplomatic transaction) so you cant just keep spamming them, restarting them the same turn the ai declares peace (and also so the AI had to respect the peace treaty I just paid them to sign for at least a little while).

Id like to see some diplo mechanics introduced whereby you could gradually engage in trying to destabilize the realtions between nations over time without resorting to the ham fisted approach of paying them to instantly go to war(which should be prohibitively expensive). Also, it could be used to drop the relations between two nations that have grown too close to be paid off to fight each other. Someone suggested to me this could be a function attached to spies, lending them some more desperately needed value.

I agree with Bingjack's assessment.

It's super cheap and easy to start wars. I play on large, easily have 20-30k saved up by the time the inevitable early wars hit, and I can pay several AIs to fight at 2-3k-ish each. One can easily pay more to upgrade a single ship at times. And you'd be lucky to buy any but an intro level tech for that amount.

In my first game after the patch, I found that AIs were seemingly freely trading good techs. I tried to get a tech 3 of them had, and they wanted about 20 techs for the one.

In my second/current game, tech trading is disabled. I'm not that fond of playing against "team research."

I definitely think it's cheesy if players can easily trade for techs and grossly manipulate the tech landscape (and think abusing the AIs via diplo is cheesy). However, it's equally cheesy when the AIs readily share tech but want "the store" from players.

Do the AIs have the same 10 turn limit on contacting other AIs? Not that it matters when you're practically giving away techs to other AIs.

I'm sorry, is there proof that the AI is giving to each other freely?

Any trades between AIs will be shown in the debug file, and in 1.5X there are a lot less of them.