Civ 6 has a new patch, and it has a slew of exciting developments. First off, Canada got a buff because it was mind bogglingly wretched. Now it is better! By which I mean it is still so bad that a civ with 'has no abilities' would probably be equally powerful. Canada does have benefits, certainly, but they come packaged with two crushing penalties - one, the inability to war on city states or declare surprise wars, and a tundra start bias. Those penalties are more of a detriment that all of its benefits combined as far as I am concerned, so Canada occupies a unique place at the bottom of the power rankings, even directly after a buff. Ouch.
Also there are tons of other changes, most of which seem great. Particularly awesome is the new map search feature that allows players to search for anything on the map. I love it. I am struggling to avoid saying "How was this not in the game before?" I guess I failed at silence. As usual.
However, there is one really weird thing going on with trading. The AI was supposedly upgraded in terms of its valuation of things, in part to avoid certain exploits that existed where players could sell single bits of resources for huge sums. Instead of selling 20 Iron for 60 gold, you could sell 1 Iron for 20 gold, for example, and take all of the AI's money. In theory they closed that exploit, but now the AI just offers enormous, outsized sums for all kinds of things.
The conversation in the trade screen goes something like this:
AI: Give me your Truffles! I want that luxury!
Me: Sure, give me 120 gold to have my Truffles for 30 turns.
AI: No deal!
Me: Okay, how about you tell me what you would give me instead?
AI: I will give you 30 gold every turn for 30 turns.
Me: ?!??!?!?
This is constant, basically. The AI is conservative with raw gold, but it has no hesitation in offering huge gold per turn values for basically anything. It sees no problem in paying me 900 total gold for a luxury. In the early game this is leading me (and plenty of other players) to be swimming in gold, buying everything I want with the AI's treasury. Sometimes I can't even find buyers for my stuff because they are already bankrupt paying me. I don't even have to do anything 'tricky'. I just put stuff they want in the window, ask them for an offer, and accept it.
This all seems ridiculous and totally broken. However, when I asked myself how broken it was I was forced to admit that I have no idea what a luxury is actually worth. How much stuff can I get for a luxury? What is the correct price?
So I did some counting.
In the early game a simulated size 6 city is making 4 net food, 13 production, 7 science, 5 culture, no faith, and 12 gold. A luxury gives one amenity to four cities, and each amenity has a 50/50 shot of having no effect (due to rounding) or pushing the city to a new breakpoint. The breakpoint gives 5% more stuff (10% more food) so it is worth roughly 4 gold per turn, counting 1 gold as .5 other stuff. A crappy city in the same era is generating about half the stuff, so if you have four cities, you could expect to get 6 gold / turn value from a luxury. The AI used to offer about that much for a luxury, which seemed reasonable.
However, this isn't the whole story. The breakpoints are usually 2 Amenities apart, but there are three in a row at -1, 0, 1. Also if you are in the negatives the food penalties are larger than the positive benefits of being happy. This means luxuries are much better if you aren't happy, and are particularly important right around 0. At a guess this increases the average value of luxuries by 50%, so in the early game when you have four cities with the best one being around size 6 you could ballpark the value of a luxury at 9 gold / turn.
In an endgame save I have I checked what the value of a luxury would be to my best city and my worst, and assumed those two cities hit a breakpoint and the other two cities the luxury affected missed the breakpoint. Not a perfect model, but not bad. This new math put the value of a luxury at a whopping 66 gold / turn!
Even with this new crazy valuation of stuff the AI never offered me anything like 66 gold / turn for a luxury, even though that would be a 'fair' offer. However, it does mean that when it offers up 30 gold / turn I know that this is a fantastic deal for both sides - the best kind of deal!
So in the late game the AI is actually being totally reasonable in terms of valuing luxuries. There are still serious problems though. The first is that it is offering these huge sums in early eras when there is no possible way the luxuries are worth that amount. It bankrupts itself buying stuff from me, and I can't buy luxuries from it because it demands similarly outrageous sums.
The other problem is that the trade deals are just as silly when it comes to strategic resources like Iron and Horses. Those are useful, certainly, but there is no world in which they are worth hundreds of gold. You can always just buy weaker units that don't cost strategic resources like archers or spears and have plenty of success. At no point is a strategic resource worth the amount of money the AI offers for it.
I hope they patch this soon. I suspect that it is simply a problem with the value of gold / turn, because the AI is hesitant to give out much in the way of up front gold, and when the AIs are giving gold to each other for disaster relief the gold they give is *preposterous*. I had one AI that got an emergency declared for them because of a flood and they took in 25,000 gold in donations. I suspect that is based on the other AIs flooding them with gold / turn because of inappropriate valuations of it.
Likely this is the sort of bug that can be fixed by changing a single constant somewhere in the code. However, knowing that this is the way the math shakes out certainly tells me that I should be buying luxuries from the AI at 5 gold / turn as often as I can as soon as I am in the midgame and beyond. I didn't realize how powerful luxuries were at that point, but now that I do I am going to use it.
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