Influance trading Exploit

What's even stranger is the way the game locks up when trading in Player influence points. I've noticed this in ToA a few times when I've been trying to buy ship/techs/planets from the AI and clicked on the Influence slider when I meant to click on the Money slider.

It would seem, therefore, that one bug has cancelled out the opportunity to fully avail onesself of the other.

That's why you always put up the influence trade before asking for something - the game runs every integer trade value through whatever algorythm is used to determine whether AI will accept the trade. Late in a game, this means it has to test hundreds of millions of integers until it decides no, there is no value the AI will accept in trade.

Trading for bcs generally doesn't do this, as there are far fewer integers to test, and each unit has far more value. That means the AI is more likely to accept the trade at a lower numerical value, and even if it doesn't accept it doesn't take several minutes to determine that it won't.

As for actually trading influence points, the AI values them inversely (but not at a linear rate) to how many you are offering. offering 100 at at time will get you a better exchange for bc than will offering 1000 at a time. offering more than 1000 is pretty counterproductive, as the trade value drops to nearly zero. Offering 1000 (or more commonly 999) at a time seems to be the best tradeoff between wrist fatigue and trade value

It does this for money, too.  Which is very annoying when you're running a treasury of ~5M.

Except if you have it down to 3 planets and you're trying to buy them.  Then it takes 45-60 seconds and eats up 100% of one core to do so.

If there's one thing I want fixed in GC2, it's this.  I can almost find the value faster than the algorithm can, when we're dealing with numbers that high, and I'm only human.

And it's sad that I've already reported the bug that it tries every integer value. 

Seeing as I always have several orders of magnitude more influence than money, I've never really noticed that.

I just checked, 32 million IP and it's only June of that year.

BC thread

It's actually marginally noticeable with the econ treaties in the first year or three if you have enough cash laying around as well.  (Some games I actually do.)

I think the problem here is : you simply get WAY too much influance points each turn. (Anyone agree?)

It should be reduced at 10% gain rate  

Yeah...that an major reducing but at less you will have more diffilcult using this exploit.

That way istend of having 50000 points and trading 999 for about 150-300bc about 50 times...talk about free money 

There will be 5000 points trading 999 for 150-300bc 5times istend of 50.THAT will greatly reduce the exploit power

And now an other BIG problem : Will the creators do this? i think i have an idia bout that... 

That would cripple influence in the other ways its intended to work (cultural conquest etc). More reasonable would be a /2 or /3 after each BC calculation.

Hmmm True

That an idia.. istend of using 0-1000 scale values, there should be changed to 0-10000 so u need to give 9999 influance points to get about 200bm istend of 999 points to get the same.

That would make the exploit much less usable at less...

(still missing the Watch This Post function)

There isnt really a Point in trading Influence at all (as far as I know the only use of those Points is at the UP meeting each Year) - so why not remove this feature entirely - and so stopping an annying (and game braking) exploit.