Several threads have already uncovered the difficulties associated with unlimited tech trading - primarily the powerful strategy of going through the diplomacy screen every few turns and trading the same techs to other civs for new techs, BCs or some combination thereof (AKA "tech-whoring").
Others have suggested that an option to disable tech trading would be good, and while having this option may help, I seriously doubt I would use it, as having _some_ amount of tech trading is just too useful. I also think there is a better way to limit the power of tech trading other than having the human player voluntarily handicap himself.
Someone on another thread pointed out that the economy of supply and demand seems to be out of whack when it comes to technology - and I think this is right. So my suggestion would be to introduce some supply and demand principles to the world of tech in GalCiv II.
Here's some examples of what I mean:
1) Technologies become less valuable (perhaps exponentially less valuable) as more and more races acquire them. Thus, if you are first to develop "Laser 1" and then sell that to the Torians, when you turn around and sell it to the Altarians as well, they will pay only a fraction of what the Torians paid (all other things being equal), and the Arceans will pay even less than that if you sell to them next, and so on. You could even have a dialogue similar to the "why would I pay for the prerequisite technologies" responses pop up--i.e., "why should I pay full price for Laser 1? I could probably get it from the Torians for less!"
2) The rise or drop in prices for "widely known" technologies _could_ be linked to espionage. That is, if a race has spent some money in espionage, then they should "know" whether other races have the technology you're trying to sell them. But if the other race (or the player, for that matter) doesn't have espionage working, perhaps you could still put one over on them. This would increase the value of espionage for both the player and the other races (as it is, I often spend nothing on espionage and do pretty well without it) and also might let tech-trading still have some value at the beginning of the game (when many players use it to keep afloat) but become progressively less lucrative as the game goes on, forcing the player to adopt less "prostitutionary" strategies.
Any other ideas?
