I was in a game tonight, and mid game I was outpacing the AI in tech by a wide margin. I wanted to sell some tech because I was only running at about 30% capacity but all of the AIs were broke. Well, it occured to me that I could take the 35,000bc I had in the bank and give it to all the AIs and then the next turn, sell them all of my techs for all of their cash, over 50+ months. It worked beautifully. I had the three remaining AIs paying me about 7000bc per turn each, with payment periods ranging from 35 turns to 117 turns. Production was pumped to 100% and I was still pulling in a difference of about 6,000bc per turn. More cheese to be fixed I guess 
      
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Giving AI cash to loot them further is known cheese. Selling tech for cash is too overpowered IMO. It's good that they nerfed it for Maso. I feel that they should also nerf it on a reducing scale from Crippling to Challenging.
       
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Another possible fix would be to update the AI to understand this tactic rather than not having them buy tech. The AI could recognize that the human has given them free cash and then for the next say 20 turns to throw out a number the AI would buy techs only at a much reduced cost (the actual number of turns could be based on the spend rate of the AI race and the amount of cash given) . This would pretty well kill it for all of the difficulty levels without having to adjust the normal tech selling rates at each difficulty level.
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Even without the free cash, the fact that AIs buy techs into bankruptcy is something no human player would usually do. They should reject trades that bring them deeply into the red unless they really need the tech or they have been given a great deal.
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One thing that might help would be if techs that lots of other races already have were valued at a lower rate (on the grounds that they could buy it from someone else instead). I'm often willing to pay quite a lot of money to buy a tech if I can then trade it to every other race in the game.
It also seems wrong that minor races are willing to pay more cash for techs than majors, even though they have a much lower income.
Another thing: at the moment you can keep receiving income from extinct races. I don't think this should happen. I think extinct species should be able to keep on receiving money from trades (to prevent abuses), but not to keep paying out.
   
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| It also seems wrong that minor races are willing to pay more cash for techs than majors, even though they have a much lower income. |
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I thought this was due to the higher diplomacy for majors as compared to minors.
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I think the extinction of a race should either
a) pass the debt onto the race taking over
or
b) wipe out all debt in or out (this wouldn't be "abuse", the same tactic could easily be used by a government on earth today, and no doubt has been used at least at some time in the past.
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'It also seems wrong that minor races are willing to pay more cash for techs than majors, even though they have a much lower income.'
I thought this was due to the higher diplomacy for majors as compared to minors. |
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I remember reading that in one of the versions, minors had been made more generous. This might have been through a diplomacy penalty. I do think there should be an upper limit to the diplomatic advantage you can have over anyone.
| b) wipe out all debt in or out (this wouldn't be "abuse", the same tactic could easily be used by a government on earth today, and no doubt has been used at least at some time in the past. |
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It used to work that way, but it was too easy to buy loads of stuff off someone, spreading the payments over 50 turns, and then destroy the race next turn so you only end up paying a tiny fraction of what you agreed. It might work in real life, but as a tactic it was too unbalanced.
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| Evaluating the worth of a given tech is very hard work however. |
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I was thinking as a simplistic general rule, the smaller the empire, the less valuable the tech or trade good is. Something that gives +10 morale when you've got 30 planets improves morale for thirty times as many people as it will if you've only got one planet.
Another AI trade problem: a race with one +68% influence base will happily sell it to you, even when it means certain assimilation for their entire empire.
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