Trading projects to AI (aka free money)

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delor
Posts: 18
Joined: Mon Dec 26, 2022 4:21 pm

Trading projects to AI (aka free money)

Post by delor »

One bit of feedback- the AI seems to value projects way too much when trading.

As a player, I value projects in trade as nearly worthless outside of edge cases where I need to rush something or didn't get access to something. There are always, always more projects that would be useful to complete than I can actually complete. Getting access to something new via trade usually just represents a minor optimization to a tech order versus researching something else and waiting for a project to organically become available.

Offer the AI a project in trade, though, and you can pretty much demand all of their cash, maybe an org or two, and some additional resources on the side. It feels downright exploitative- any time I'm out of cash, I can just do some make contact missions and gain thousands of more dollars without giving up anything or even giving another faction much of anything.

It'd be one thing if this was like most Civlikes or 4X games where trading for a technology actually gives you technology, but merely the option to research it has little value yet is valued in the trading AI as being worth so much. I feel like both aspects should be addressed- trading for a project ought to give you 50% research progress towards it so it has more value, and the AI ought to value the projects as being worth less.
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