Sounds like you just don't want trading...

Unless they can properly balance techs, your either going to get a lot of money or smaller techs. Because just as you say, "Would you give the AI awesome technologies just to get a bunch of weak ones in return" your not going to give a more powerful tech for a weaker one, and the AI apparently won't give a more powerful tech for a weaker one, so who blinks first?

Good thread. 

Over at the thread showcasing the Crusade I made a post or two regarding a fundamental change in diplomacy. We need different levers or ones that work indirectly. Ones like using Pirates as go between to cause havoc/mayhem upon another ai/player. I make a deal with the Iridium to hire pirates to raid/interdict the trade/food routes of the Yor or Altarians. This 3rd party manipulation would be great but I doubt it would be easy to code/write. 

Ideally it would be nice if you gave the core races specific goals or at least weighted it to favor those goals and played to achieve them. Malevolent favoring races would favor trades and goals that help conquest. Neutral/Pragmatic would favor influence and using 3rd parties to cause mayhem and manipulate others. Benevolent favoring races would pursue a diplomatic win. By the way, can the ai ever win with a diplomatic victory or an ascension one?

Another thing is to have the ai value everything it has more. It needs to value time. If you offer it 3 'crappy' techs but cumulatively it would take the ai to get all 3 say 15 turns, then exchanging those three for one that would take you 5 turns to get would work. (3 to 1).  Its just a thought. 

Going to the goal oriented ai... 

Drengin they would be coded to heavily favor conquest. As such all conquest oriented techs are prioritized and of higher value to him. He is very unlikely to give you tech that reduces the size of missiles by 20%. Instead he is happy to offer you farming tech! Now the big question Ice, is would this be better? I know we are getting game changing game mechanics and I'd like to see how it works and see if some of the comments that Brad makes about slowing/stopping the abuse of the player against the ai pan out. 

Meh, I am rambling again. Nice to see you again Icemania. You did great work on Distant Worlds. 

One thing I will add is the game still needs to have a fun factor. We play it to have fun and hundreds of hours of my time is happily wasted! I'd like it harder to abuse the ai but it would not be fun if you made it 'impossible' or near so. If the amount of willingness to do trades was able to be tied to difficulty that would help I suppose. 

No.  As I said I definitely want trading just not so much OP.

Most of them yeah. Feel free to post if you think it does not or something needs tweaking

Quoting Horemvore,

reply 7

Most of them yeah. Feel free to post if you think it does not or something needs tweaking

Cool I'll check it out.  If that's the case some of what you've done should be included in the base game!

Has happened elsewhere, Gal Civ 2 for example, or one I was involved in was for Stardrive 2 (not that the Mod was implemented correctly but anyway).

https://explorminate.net/2016/05/23/monday-modness-stardrive-2-community-ai-patch/

The point is that the AI will accept deals that no sensible player would on a frequent basis.  The AI will accept 3,000 credits from Free Trade Agreements every time.  There is no concept of value which you have when you consider a trade, or so it seems.  The deals are so one-sided you can milk much more than just all the AI technologies, you can start to farm their resources etc.  

I'm amazed you haven't seen the option to get the AI to declare war.  Just go to the diplomacy screen for any Malevolent race.  Hit Declare War.  The range for me is 3,000 to about 7,000 credits.  Because you can milk the AI so much, there is plenty of cash available to do this, and you can use it to turn the galaxy into total chaos, then just mop up a target of your choosing.  All I can think is that you haven't got good enough relations with Malevolent races, perhaps, but this is easy to do with a bit of an early game focus on diplomacy research/buildings.

I've done this dozens of times in many games.  I've never seen the costs you mention.  And I've posted a bunch of save games in the past showing examples of my experience.  So it would be useful to get to the bottom of the difference in our experiences.

When I play, relations with all AI are always very positive, and basically any time after Turn 50-60, I could claim an Alliance Victory if it was turned on (Huge maps are my preference).  I mainly play Godlike, so at his point in the game, I'm weaker than everybody often by a lot (at least in terms of the game's power rating).  So I'm assuming as you are suggesting that those higher costs that you see come about due to not quite so positive relations.  The problem is, getting those very positive relations is easy to do in every game.

Another option might be that there are major changes on this specific issue in 2.0.  I've only played one quick game with 2.0, got to Turn 64 in a position to win an Alliance Victory (in a speed run so could have been done way earlier), didn't notice much of a difference in diplomacy exploitation, so I turned it off (while remaining cautiously optimistic about Crusade).

As an aside, over at eXplorminate there is mention this topic may relate to an upcoming dev diary, which I'm looking forward to reading about.

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/explorminate/discussions/0/537405286635828795/?ctp=39#c135511027323855462

Losing battle with forum quoting and cannot delete

Losing battle with forum quoting and cannot delete

I think we have differing playstyles.  First, I never played godlike.  And with 2.0, I still have not finished my 1st genius (well, 2 levels above normal, can't remember the name) game.

And I usually don't aim for full diplomacy, so I don't build a ton of embassies.  I play a custom race with the thalan tech tree, aim for neutral, pick the "no war for 50 turns" thing, I build xeno anthropoligical improvements and cultural centers, than I build a fleet and start defending/attacking against some AIs, one by one, or at most 2, until I am in reach of a conquest victory.   That's my fun, seeing all the upgrades

I think the reason we have different experiences is you build a lot of embassies to survive in godlike, and these bonuses to diplomacy may just stack a little too much as you advance in the game.  Which then makes it easy to exploit the AI.  In this current game, I was at war with an AI, but that wasn't enough to make our relations move from "close".

I'm hesitant to record my observations on diplomacy, or starbase managements right now, because with the Crusade expansion, there will be a lot of changes, and unless there is an easy way to fix things in both Crusade and the base game, I think Stardock will abandon patching the base game if it's something done in an entirely different way in Crusade.  Or they'll change how things work globally, without taking into account the new citizens feature.