Yes, it is now much more difficult to trade tech - or anything else, for that matter. The diplomacy of trading has been completely overhauled in DA.

My guess this was done to pinch 'tech whoring', where a player would do serial trading of a single tech and walk away with the store (even without Super Diplo). Now the AI will generally never trade for weapons tech, and especially advanced weapons tech or any extreme colonization tech. Any trade you do get will generally be to your disadvantage, Super Diplomat not withstanding.

Is tech trading eliminated overall? Nope. The AI is trading tech with other AIs at a very nice clip. Just check your debug.err file, open it in Word or similar, and you’ll see a number of trades for just about everything. I’ve noticed that even the diplomatically challenged AIs like the Drengin get some sweetheart deals. And the AI’s DO trade extreme colonization techs rather freely, so you’re likely to find yourself struggling as waves of extreme colonization techs wash though the races – but not to you. You will have to research it on your own, thank-you-very-much. I have not, however, noticed the AI trading weapons tech.

That said, this change is probably a good thing. In a recent game pre-patch game as the Terran I was able to get the tech from almost every AI – every one! – a passel of scouts, lots of eco and research treaties from the AI, and 5 Krynn planets (!!). On a small map the extra planets alone essentially means I just won the game (see my Terran Diplomacy AAR is you’re interested in the details).

So is the Super Diplomat ability worthless? Absolutely not. This will be key in keeping the AI happy with you, and you will definitely be able to get better trades than without (suffice to say, without it you generally get squat).

As a result I’ve approached the post-patch DA with resignation, and any tech trades I just accept are going to be to my disadvantage and I’ll take what I can get. This isn’t totally terrible since if you do trade with all the AIs you’ll still do OK, even if you can only peel some BCs out of them. For instance, I traded an industrial and Planetary Improvement techs to all the AIs and netted ~600 BC. Not bad, and a nice profit in the early game. Just don’t expect techs in kind, or if you do get techs they’ll likely to be of much less ‘research time’ worth.

The other approach is to turn off tech trading, which is what I’ve been doing recently. This is really a different game, and it is both easier and harder at the same time. I’ve found in my limited experience that the AI doesn’t leap-frog me in tech anymore (see my comment about inter-AI tech trading), and that the AIs follow their own tech path. There isn’t any more AI Group Research (kind of an AI cheat, as it were). A side effect is that diplomacy victories are a real challenge since the AIs don’t tend to research Alliance, and you can’t give it to them with tech trading off – and without the Alliance tech you can’t get an ally. In the few games I’ve played post patch w/o tech trading only the Terran has researched Alliance, which is a shame since that tech line is so valuable with advanced governments. Likewise, conquerors will find the tech they get from taking planets even sweater, as with the Super Spies out there that infiltrate and steel techs (like scoring Advanced Toxic, like my Krynn recently did!).

I suggest exploring the post-patch game with an open mind. You may be surprised.

Hydro

I agree with you.

It is a nerf of an entire style of play.

It makes no sense.

Diplomacy isn't a viable way to play in my opinion, unless you are considering this a style of play where you try to make it extremely hard to survive.

In general a lot of changes they have been making are forcing a very limited game style.

In my opinion the game is now reduced to

colony rush
war

Influence and Diplomacy are pretty much shut off as viable routes.

- Livonya

I'm sure we'll see another rebalancing in the next patch, there has been a fair amount of complaining about it on the forum. I do prefer it over what it was like in the vanilla game though. Then it was way too easy to trade your way to tech superiority. I could trade a colonization tech for another one, plus get 2-4 others and a bunch of cash. I never even bothered to research them, I just traded. Now I have to put a bit of effort into it. You can still make some deals here and there, and if you're prepared to trade 4-5 of your techs for one of theirs you can still do fairly well, especially if you have alot of races in the game. I sure would like to see it be more even though, it gets downright annoying trying to make a deal sometimes.

I am not talking about victory conditions. I am talking about paths to victory.

It used to be you could use diplomacy as a strategy to win a game. I don't see that as possible anymore.

Now the only way that you can compete with an AI that will trade with itself but won't trade with you is to invade planets for tech.

Flipping planets is no longer effective because you don't get tech.

In my opinion the only path to victory is now colony rush followed by invasions.

I find myself invading small PQ2 and PQ4 planets that are going to flip because I need a chance at the tech theft.

Before I would sometimes go diplomatic or go influence (I still intend to win via civilization conquest) rather than straight out planet invasion.

But now I am forced to go planet invasion so I can keep up with tech.

That just seems limiting to me.

My game now consists of colony rush, followed by rush to planet invasion, followed by rush to invade to steal tech.

I prefered the variety of previous builds.

- Livonya