No tech trading is a different game. Tech is more valuable, which means a couple of things:

• Getting tech via espionage might make it espionage more valuable since
• Invading is more powerful due to the free tech. After all, if you can’t trade – just invade!
• You don’t have Group AI Research. If you’ve poked around the turn files you’ll see quite a bit of AI to AI tech trading going on, with a shocking number of good deals – none of which you’ll get as a human player. The AI even trades colonization and occasionally military tech. This is frustrating for me, even if you swallow hard and accept 3 for 1 trades with all the AIs.

As Folkenwolfe has said, no tech trading makes you select which techs more carefully and you have to balance weapons vs diplomacy vs influence vs development. All are valuable, and in some cases you just cannot let yourself fall behind. You can’t just call up a friendly AI, trade or buy an economic tech (for instance), and then charge ahead.

There are other less obvious implications. First, alliance victories are vary hard to come by since the AI rarely in my games bothers to research that part of the tech tree. In many games I’ve only seen a few races such as the Terran go up to Alliances or beyond. With tech trading you get a close relationship, gift them alliance, and you’re good to go. Without tech trading you may be in for a very long – or endless – wait.

Also, many of the standard methods for raising cash in those desperate early years are nixed. You can’t sell all or some of your tech to get by – you’ll have to find other ways to keep your economy limping along (or just make better choices before you get there!). This forces the human player to think differently, which is always a good thing.

It also makes the AI and human player empires have more character. You can see, for instance, who is investing in extreme colonization, weapons, economy, etc – and the benefits each investment brings. Otherwise Group AI Research bootstraps all the AIs roughly along at the same pace until a few pull ahead.

Overall I like no tech trading better. It makes me think and adapt, and nixes what I hate most: Group AI Research. A level playing field is a good thing!

Hydro

P.S. – I’ve only played at Painful levels. Others may have different observations at other levels of difficulty.

[[quote]Interesting , the opposite has been said.

What other settings were you on folkewolfe ?


I'm not a pro, but I play at crippling, medium map, this case 3 AI, Tight Clusters, abundent habitable, common anamolies, normal tech speed. I always play as the Terreans. However, I finally got myself to go evil and it makes things pretty easy.

Like I said before, most of my planets were not very good. PQ12 was the highest with no special tiles. I was foturnate that most of the resourses were close to me.

It must be a difficult balance to maintain. When I build planetary improvements in my DL games my social spending slider is set to 80 and military and tech are set to 10 each. When I research, tech is 80 and social and military are 10 each. I research techs that are 5 turns or less unless I need a specific one. Once I hit 5 turns I research the next highest research facility and turn my tech down to 10 during upgrade. Then its back to 80. If I need more mp I research the next higher improvement, and the cycle repeats. When the tech tree is finished (usually about 5 game years on very slow) tech is lowered to permanently to 10 for tech victory since I never enable it. I find that even when I am doing 67% of the research the !@#$ AI still stays ahead. Maybe diabling tech trade would allow me to actually play with tech victory enabled for once?