Just as the title says: I believe technology exchanges with other AI factions to be too strong at the moment. At least, they get stronger the more factions there are you can trade with.



The math is simple: you can potentially exchange the same technology with each faction that doesn't have it yet, each time gaining a different technology in return (or several technologies worth more or less the same amount of research points). The net result is that you get several technologies whereas those you traded with only gain one. If you repeat this process several times with the newly gained technologies, it is quite easy to get all the technologies that have been researched by every faction you are at peace with in no time. In my opinion this makes the pacific victory conditions far too easy to achieve, even at the highest difficulty setting.



A few ideas:

- The AI also uses this stratagem, immediately trading newly discovered technologies with as many factions as possible (if the player can do it, why not the AI since it is so effective).

- The AI refuses to give away technologies that no other faction knows.

- Increase the worth of a technology during trades based on the amount of factions that do not know that technology yet.

- Limit the amount of technologies that can be traded per turn.

- Technologies obtained by trade cannot be traded for X turns, or cannot be traded at all.

- My favourite: part of the trade agreement is that you may not trade the newly acquired technology with others, i.e. the faction you obtained the technology from retains some kind of rights on it. If you disregard that agreement, you will get a penalty to your politic relations with that faction.

- Suggested by Nasarog: turn off technology trading altogether.



(reposted, was in the wrong forum)



EDIT: sorry, I forgot the "suggestion" tag in the title and it doesn't seem possible to edit it...

Technology exchanges are already pretty bad. Try getting a technology worth more than 900 research points from the AI. They demand like 4-5 techs from you in return, with each tech being worth more than the one you are trying to get! One time, trying to get a 3K point tech from one of the AI, I had to give them all the techs in the list, which included 3 900 point ones and 2 18000 point ones, along with 3-4 other techs of various levels.

I think that depends on you relations with the faction you are trading with. If the relation is positive, you can even get more than what you are giving out. Moreover, I noticed that techs which are already partially researched by the AI are worth less (which is quite logical).