civ 3 diplomacy woes

sir stanley · June 17, 2003, 12:38

I'm having trouble with the diplomacy aspect of the game (Civ III). It's no fun because the AI doesn't want to make reasonable trades for technology (unlike alpha centauri which is fun and very fair.) Am I doing something wrong? I have a strategy guide that claims that there's a way that you can get trades heavily in your favour (if you trade on your turn and find out ahead of time what the AI wants. But it doesn't work for me.) I got so angry with a country for their fatuous demands that I invaded them and wiped them off the map. It has to be better than this. P.S. It could be ignorance on my part. I'm a newbie and have only played a couple of games of alpha centauri. Oh ya. and evidently these countries respect my culture. Sir Stanley

vmxa1 · June 17, 2003, 13:11

One key aspect of doing any trading is your military power. Go to the Mil advisor and see what he says about your relative strength verses the Civ.
If it says you are weaker, you can expect to not get a good deal and in fact may soon face demands.
Understand, that you may have better units and could in fact defeat that civ, but that does not matter. It basically comes down to who has the most troops, even thought patches tried to take into account the unit power.

Rhothaerill · June 17, 2003, 13:25

Another factor is the difficulty you play on. That also affects the AI attitudes toward you as they are less inclined to give you a good deal on the higher difficulties.

A third factor is the age of the game. Even civs you are friendly with will demand more and more as time goes by and you have more commercial power. In a recent game I played I had to trade for four different luxuries. I was a commercial civ and had a lot of incoming GPT deals of my own so I didn't worry about the amount of outgoing GPT too much. Every 20-30 turns the civs decided they wanted just a little bit more GPT for that same luxury, especially when we all entered the Industrial Age. I paid them off just so I could keep my science slider set at max and outresearch everyone, while still maintaining a happy populace.