Found a very cheesy strat...

Yes very cheesy :/

I found it more or less by accident, or rather, it turned out to be cheese by accident. I was in war trouble, so I had to give up a planet for the first time - I picked my worst and surprisingly, the AI that was about to conquer half my empire accepted my peace offer with the planet. However, I had taken that planet a while ago with influence starbases, so naturally, it reverted back to me a few turns later. Next time war came up I did the same thing, remembering how good it worked, and in fact it was like a charm. After I realized how easy it was, I built some more inflence bases and gave away the planet over the whole game for a total of 19 cases - guess the AI ain't that smart after all

The AI needs to be reprogrammed to calculate the influence factors, and not rate a trade as being a very high value if it involves planets that will likely defect in a turn or two.

That said, I'm going to go try this trick. It sounds promising.

You can also use this to buy enemy starbases as I just noticed - exchange them for the planet, wait for the planet to come back, rinse, repeat - I played a giant map and made the CPUs sell me ALL ressource spots I had like +500% to military lol.

well, if one has the time and money to built 15+ starbases in one sector, all upgraded with influence...then by all means...he does deserve his planet back....

well in the scheme of things, I think this should be one of the last things looked at. Don't have to use that strategy, since its sorta cheating.

But that being said, it shouldn't be too hard for the AI to calculate the Influence points for the next couple turns before accepting.

I saw it in guides to Civ3 so it's not a new strat. But because you can gain unlimited advantage with it, it's unfair to use it IMHO.

~SDC~

There are so MANY things in this game you should not do because they would be unfair to exploit

Well at least I hope they put a max on the number of starbases in a system (or do something else to counter this strategy). Maybe max 3 in a system (not included those on resource spots).

would be better to just max the summation of bonuses. They did during one stage of teh beta but eventually reverted to letting bonus sum up. Brad's approach was to make maxing a single starbase fr superiour to have a few non maxed bases. Unfortunately it just means that you can build a few maxed out bases and totally skew the situation.

The issue with AI's accepting planets which will quickly revolt back has already been raised.

Paul.

~SDC~

With the starbase issue, the military bonuses definitely seem to add up, because they show up on my ships. You can make your home sector nearly impossible for the enemy to invade by building a bunch of starbases there.

I assume the productions bonuses add up too, but I don't know how to confirm this: I can't understand what the planet detail screen means! I wish they would make all the production increase issues more understandable.

http://www.galciv.com/forum.asp?id=37539&BID=GF&page=1

Another reason to look closely at how starbases are being abused in the game.

One fix for sure would be to limit starbase numbers to colonized systems and ressources in a sector. So if you have two systems and one ressource in a sector, this sector could hold at most three star bases - not too overpowering. It would also stop you from building hundreds of starbases in trade lanes, which don't seem to have any upper limit on how much they can be improved by starbase addons.

And let's be honest here, in the lategame its no problem at all pumping out a few hundred constructors. "Starbase farming" is unbalanced in every possible way. And it's even worse because the AI won't do it, so if you build alot of starbases, you will have an incredible advantage.