No changes that I can see. Their super ability is still essentially useless.

The Gaia Vortex is online. You get it after you have selected good as your alignment

The Thalan tech tree (and/or starting stats). They put way too much work into making them possibly the most unique race to intend for them to be this gimped. I don't believe that is what they intend and will keep for the release.

I don't think they need the factories right out of the gate, but perhaps earlier than it is right now. Moving it up a few notches would make a big difference (and possibly the pink blob of doom will go away). Heck, moving the rank 1 factory/lab much earlier than having to work you way up to the rank 2/3 sets would make a difference. Yes, you'd be bleeding money like a madman, but at least you'd have buildings.

Well of course they do, anything else would be unfair, because unlike them you can freely sell what you just bought for something else.

I think Xenocide is referring to the fact that when you trade with the AI, it always occurs on your turn, so that you can immediately turn around and resell the same technology before the AI can. Of course, I don't see why this is an advantage at all, given that the AI already had his chance (as he had the technology before you), and declined to do this (or already did).

The AI displays an extremely curious reluctance to sell ANY weapons technology, however. It baffles me as to how the AI races of the game can come to an almost uniform decision of what should be the dominating weapon paradigm in the galaxy given that they refuse to share any weapons technology, even horribly obsolete ones, for any price. I mean, unless you've been bootstrapped into committing to one type of weapon, there's no specific reason why you would choose the same weapon as anyone else. Indeed, if anything, I always choose an entirely different weapon if I am late to the weapons race (and I usually prefer to take a wait-and-see attitude), so as to have a weapon that no one else has a useful defense against, with the result that after the galaxy has already decided what the dominant weapon/defense paradigm is, I violate it like a schoolgirl in a Japanese cartoon.

There seems to have been a fair amount of talk lately on this subject, and the consensus I'm seeing is that there is some significant difference in how the computer players trade amongst themselves vs. with the player.

I would not object to stinginess w/ weapon techs, *if* I saw evidence that the policy was applied equally to all civs (or at least clearly pegged to civ-civ relations).

I just really dislike what seems to be a rules-driven trend to tech homogeneity, and from what I've read so far about the TA trading, the "unique" tech trees are being seriously watered down by this problem.

I believe that once the ratio of your military rating to a given race's military rating passes a certain point, they become unwilling to give up weapons tech in all but the most extreme circumstances. This includes very weak weapons tech. In a way, this makes sense. Why make the superpower stronger?