Racial Techs - Bug or WAD?

[PaulP]

I notice that racial techs seem to be traded very frequently, so much so that I keep getting offered racial techs from my friends that they can't naturally research - so the AI are apparently trading them among themselves. In one game I managed to purchase the special repair bots, efficient engines, hyper drives, reactors, and their shields from the Zenox whom I had befriended. I'm not sure if this is a bug or WAD (I'm hoping it's a bug...). This kinda kills the individuality of the races, and doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Why would a race trade their unique advantage away to the whole universe?

A kinda related issue which seemed a bit odd is I tried to disable racial techs because I wanted to try a game without them since they were being traded everywhere anyway. I set all the races to have no special tech. The surprising result of this is that it allowed everyone to research them. Now this might be desirable to some people, but my intent was to remove them. Maybe we could get an option somewhere to just disable racial techs? It could be in the game setup screen as a checkbox beside research rate or something.

Although if you guys are adding extended modding support it may not be necessary (modding the research tree is my #1 modding wish).

[Kayoz]

Same issue here - I've been able to steal racial techs from AI, as well as the trading above.

I don't know, but it feels a bit weird to be able to use fish-man wave-blasters and bug torpedoes. Shouldn't these techs be unavailable for theft or trading?

[PaulP]

Ah, I didn't think that maybe they were being stolen. Maybe the Zenox in my game were sending out spies? It would make sense as to how they acquired the hyper drives, seeing as the Dhayut were not on friendly terms with either of us.
 
They definitely shouldn't be stealable via spies. Maybe have it give them to you once you conquer their empire? (after all, at that point you have their people working for you to research it for you) But not just by sending a spy.

[Krob]

I think it's more likely that they are trading them given how stupid the AI suggestions for espionage are. Why yes, lets throw our agents out with a 15% chance of being captured.


K