| You already have to pay more to get techs from races that are not similarly aligned. |
That's not an effective limit, as you can broker trades with every race to offset the higher prices for lack of diplomacy or non-matching alignments.
And it in no way limits the AI trading with itself, which is the real problem. The AI is willing to pay more money for good tech, just like the player, and since the AI efficiently balances money+tech for tech+money, almost all trade proposals are accepted between AI races. Never mind the specific AI subroutine that randomly offers tech "deals" to other races at random. This means that races behind in tech almost always get bailed out at random intervals, then use there new higher level tech to leverage deals for whatever they are missing.
Keep in mind, this is emergent behavior, not "cheating" as some others allege. But the devs (who refuse to comment on this aspect of gameplay despite the fact that there are a dozen popular threads dedicated to this issue) should really rescript this to make tech trading less frequent (for the player and the AI). An easy way to do this would be to:
1. Eliminate the sweetheart deal subroutine.
2. Dramatically reduce the incidence of trade proposals by the AI.
3. Force the AI to overvalue it's own best techs, even in the face of huge money offers (otherwise the player can still broker exploit the system), and especially refuse to trade with non-aligned races or those at war or on bad terms. This must especially apply to minor races, who are one of the biggest tech brokering loopholes, as they tend to accumulate cash while being technologically deficient, meaning they are a huge tech trading accelerant.
