Mats_SX said:
I *think* it is what a player would use to gain a Casus Belli against an AI. You would offer them a loan, they would accept, and when it's time to pay back, they refuse, and you get your CB.
I don't think that's what is meant, since it's relatively unknown/poorly understood. I think the reference is to loansharking, which it's likely only the real oldbies (more so than me, certainly
) are familiar with. It used to be perfectly feasible to loan AI countries large sums of money and finance your country with the interest. That's as much as I know for sure. Now for some speculation: I presume you start off by scraping together some cash and giving long-term loans for high interest rates, timed to come due in January or February, so AI countries can pay them back with their census taxes (in my experience using loans for CBs AIs will pay back loans if they can - which is sometimes annoying
). Another possibility would be giving the AI a second loan just as the first one is due to be returned, so they have cash to give back to you.
So it's all pretty sneaky and exploitative. You see why God doesn't like usury? He even tweaked the code to make loaning cash harder to do
