Streamlining tech trades

This feature has been requested before - adding a button that would automatically compute the BC that makes it a fair trade. I would really appreciate it, as it seems like at least 25% of my game time is now spent on the trade sliders.

Brad at one point posted something that said the AI's evaluation function changes when the lease is greater than 20 months,. It doesn't like to evaluate situtations further ahead than that. So for typical cases, the most profitable deals are 20 months and below. So the following is probably very obvious for a lot of people, but just in case you're new, this is what I typically do.

(1) Move the time slider to 20 (don't set it numerically since that doesn't update the color of the text)

(2) Move the money slider to the lowest acceptable amount.

Unfortunately, the amount of money each increment represents is a percentage of the alien's total wealth. So far rich aliens, the minimum increment is large and the money slider is useless for small changes. (psst, Cari. imo, you guys should fix the arros at one while a click on an unoccupied portion of the slider bar will move the larger increments. And moving the actual slider widget should work at the finest resolution.)

(3) As a result of the above limitation, increment the money amount via the keyboard (hit insert key to type over text if necessary)

(4) Get the text color updated by clicking on one of the arrows in the duration scrollbar. It takes two clicks to actually change the duration of the lease. So if you keep switching between the right arrow and left arrow for each new money value entered, the text color will update without changing the lease duration.

(5) When you find the largest amount he'll give for 20 turns, increment the amount by one via the keyboard. Then use the arrows to decrement the duration until he accepts.

The key is learning a bunch of little rules of thumb. If so, you can repeat 4 and 5 to get the optimal amount pretty quickly (at least compared to the non-color changing versions). For example, if the last amount accepted is >= 10, a change where you have to decrease more than one month is a worse deal.

Of course, all of this makes a million assumptions: no time value to money, the 20 moves horizon is still valid, alien has enough money so you can still sell him your other stuff, you have no time deadlines, that 1/0 duration ambiguity still exists, etc. But it is a place to start, and, most importantly, the little rules of thumb helps me to avoid all that painful thinking that I hate so much Or I suppose you could be less anal and just take suboptimal deals. Hmm. I never considered that before.


Needless to say, this is still a bit tedious. If there is no uncertainy in the aliens valuation and no cost or benefit to repeated proposal or sub-optimal amounts, adding a button that maximizes the amount for a given time frame (so you can make sure to sell them all your trade goods before you congquer them 5 moves later)would elminiate a majority of the tedium aspects of the game, at least for me. Or if that's too much, perhaps they could add a refresh button so we don't have to do the repeated type-mouse move-clik arrow dance. Perhaps hitting return updates the text color and reselects the amount, so you can immediately enter another value.

I do about the same Max. Stay anal like the rest of us.

I think that a "level off the deal with BC" button could work. It should go like this to make it simpler to program: the player determines how long the payments are to be accepted/made, puts the goods on the table, then hits the level button which would fill in the right amount of BC for the time frame specified. It would make things so much simpler for rapid tech traders like myself.