How to sell a luxury in 80 steps

[Travathian]

Even with its faults, it IS still vastly superior to the Civ2 diplomacy.

But I do agree that the proposed solution is quite nice. It would make shopping around techs and resources much easier.

I'd also like to point out that the foreign advisor is a freaking idiot. I can have five extra wines, but if the Russians don't want them, they won't take them, yet the advisor insists I should try and trade it to them!

[Grim Legacy]

Originally posted by ChrisShaffer

Yes, but you still have to go to the trading table just to find out they don't want your luxury

I think you can indeed already see so in the F4 screen, but for the mouse-click conscious, the F2 trading screen also shows the types of possible trades, which at least lets you single out the resource-for-resource deals. A disadvantage is that you need F4 to see whether they want *your* resource too... that's true.

Well, in my current game my preferred partner is the Romans. If I took your advice, I'd be getting 15 gold / turn for my spices. Using my method, I got 45 gold / turn from the Russians. That's 600 gold more - not an insignificant amount. When you multiply that by the four different types of luxuries I'm currently selling...

Ok, and what is the price of friendship? The AI will not be flattered by your razorsharp deals. And what was the strategic consequence? Did you strengthen the already strong Russians instead of boosting the weak vassal state of Rome? Etc. There are more aspects to the trading than the raw value of gold.

Anyway, I think we can agree that your complaint was more or less self-wraught. It reminds me of the IFE strategy, which also meant having an army of workers boringly molesting the land ad infinitum (how's that for tedium hehehe).
Some extra info on the F2 screen would be a nice extra though.

[ChrisShaffer]

I thought of another idea that would make things much easier. Instead of forcing the user to move between mouse and keyboard to choose an amount of gold to offer/request, why not provide either 1) provide a mouse-only option such as up/down arrows for increase/decrease or 2) provide a keyboard only option, such as allowing users to use the arrows to move between trade options on the offer table.

Originally posted by Grim Legacy
Anyway, I think we can agree that your complaint was more or less self-wraught. It reminds me of the IFE strategy, which also meant having an army of workers boringly molesting the land ad infinitum (how's that for tedium hehehe).
Some extra info on the F2 screen would be a nice extra though.

Well, I don't agree that it's self-wraught. The only "solutions" so far have been 1) use undocumented keystrokes; 2) hope Firaxis implements a better F2 screen; and 3) hope Firaxis provides a simpler way to offer/modify gold trades.

I'd say my complaint is Firaxis-wrought -- through poor documentation, lack of a good trading summary screen (for potential and existing trades), and poor usability on the trading table screen.

In any case, I like the current trading table, and you're absolutely right that there are more factors than gold in the equation. I just don't think it should take 25 or 50 actions to figure out if it's better to stick with your preferred trading party, or if now is the time to turn against them for a significantly better trade with another faction.