The current tech system will lead to big imbalances in tech trading

There are a lot of ways to deal with this and I haven't come up with a solid idea yet.

One way is that the techs translate directly into points, and you can only trade the amount of effort you put in.

Another way is each time you trade, your research breakthrough increases by one for each tech you gain, and your research halts for a turn or two to implement the new knowledge.

Another way is preventing direct trading and allowing "research pacts" to accelerate research of another nation.

 Another way is to limit the techs you can have traded/given to you by how far along in the diplomacy tree you are, putting a hard limit on how much benefit you can derive from tech trading.

Another way is that you can supply another nation with the "fruits" of your knowledge without giving them the secret, i.e, ship them bronze tools and as long as you are giving them bronze tools, they can have the benefits from the tech, but you can withdraw the treaty. In a few turns they lose the tech benefits. This could be interesting, actually, if giving them bronze tools means they get the tech benefit, and if they continue to have access to your tech treaty for a long enough time, the civilization will eventually uncover the secret of how to make the tools themselves. This both slows down how quickly you can "give" someone a tech, puts an ongoing cost to being allowed to access it, AND prevents a disasterous strategy of "Okay, you've had my farming tech for four thousand turns, I suddenly take it away and your cities starve to death," issue. I like this approach enough to consider using it in a mod, and it makes a for a really cool series of diplomatic interactions. : )

Another way is of course disabling tech trading, or revamping it somehow.

I suppose we have to ask ourselves 'what does trading tech mean?' Is tech trading something you whisper to a foriegn diplomat and he says 'of course! It's so simple!' or perhaps you hand them a few diagrams describing how to build a mine? It's abstractly dealt with, certainly, for the sake of simplicity but if it were not, if perhaps you gave them mining tech and it was a physical thing like a caravan with mining engineers, scrolls and materials that had to get to the friendly territory/settlement you're trading with and can be vulnerable to attack by neutrals. If you share borders it would be instantatious, but in the beginning it's likely they would have a fair distance to travel. That would certainly stagger the rate of tech trading.

If that is too impractical/unworkable perhaps simply have a time lapse between when you send the tech and when it is recieved (and when they send one and you receive it) with the turn lapse dependent on how far away they are from you. In larger games it may not be worth the bother until you get to more research-intensive techs, which would also help the problem of early tech proliferation.

You suppose that everybody will be tech-trading-happy. Altough I suppose that teams in multiplayer (that is possible?) could do that (self balanced by all the teams doing it?).

I can see the potential issues but technically tech trading isn't in the game yet. You can go to diplomacy screen and add techs to the trade window but the AI won't accept any trade deals right now regardless of if you have the Diplomacy tech.

As the for the issue I think the simplest solution is to have the research level increase for each tech traded. This would mean someone who trades to gain 3 techs would have his next R&D project level raised by 3 making it a long ways off. So if they really want to specialize it might not be a good thing to trade techs as it will slow down when they can get the next advancement in the area they are specializing along with other future advancements.

Overall though your argument sounds more like a reason against tech trading at all. Because I hear the same kinds of arguments when it comes to Civ games on why Tech trading should be turned off. Empires that start next to each other and trade can effectively cut in 1/2, 1/3, and so on their R&D cost based on how many there are and if they trade techs.

The argument holds true to pretty much all TBS games as tech sharing basically gives you something for nothing. It does not cost you anything to trade techs and you simply gain stuff that would of cost you resources otherwise. The only real potential cost is that your enemy is also getting something for nothing so it's a matter of are you in a good enough position that you both getting something for nothing will help you more then it does them. The answer is almost always yes as not trading techs will often lead to them trading techs else where and then your out the free tech.

Well...good relations with other factions should matter a lot. [Especially if you would like to trade high tier techs.] Also, if the AI will be decent enough [..and I am pretty sure that it will be decent :)], balancing this won't be very problematic at all imo.

 Ty TCores for bringing this up.  It would be nice if the trading technologies were allowed but not like GC2.  Would be better if the technologies traded don't receive benefits immediately via the trade.  Think there should be very strong restrictions on trading in vanilla campaign.  I want them to be allowed but just to have less influence of the overall game than they were in GC2.  Maybe a mechanic where you can only have one technology trade for x amount of turns while your faction is learning the new technology.  Kinda of a stepped process.  Normally researching your factions own tech might take less time vs learning another factions tech.  A way to limit the amount of tech trading.

Definitely, this is one of the things I'm getting at in my reply to my own post about it, taking a look at implementing some realistic things (like giving people the tools to do it for a time, etc) in order to deal with the problem.

Early tech trading has always been a problem when intelligent AI or players make use of it (if you watch the AI play games in civilization, the technologically advanced civilizations are actually the ones that are on the big continent with the most players, the island-bound ones tend to be really far behind) which is why they make it impossible to trade techs in civilization iv until you get writing. The problem in Elemental though gets a lot worse because the techs don't have a set cost. With a set cost you'll only ever get twice as good as the next one, but if the cost is variable, then it is possible to intelligently stack the tech to get huge benefits.

I assure you I don't want tech trading removed from Elemental. It's an analysis of how a straight-off tradeoff in Elemental would be badly broken, and how to make it work. Turning off tech trading for the game should be the very last design choice.

Actually I came up with the same thought you had, increasing the R&D project level for each tech trading as a fix. My favourite idea is this one:

"Another way is that you can supply another nation with the "fruits" of your knowledge without giving them the secret, i.e, ship them bronze tools and as long as you are giving them bronze tools, they can have the benefits from the tech, but you can withdraw the treaty. In a few turns they lose the tech benefits.

This could be interesting, actually, if giving them bronze tools means they get the tech benefit, and if they continue to have access to your tech treaty for a long enough time, the civilization will eventually uncover the secret of how to make the tools themselves.

This both slows down how quickly you can "give" someone a tech, puts an ongoing cost to being allowed to access it, AND prevents a disasterous strategy of "Okay, you've had my farming tech for four thousand turns, I suddenly take it away and your cities starve to death," issue. I like this approach enough to consider using it in a mod, and it makes a for a really cool series of diplomatic interactions. : )"

With respect to the op:

It seems to me that turn advantage isn't the problem (I'd say this is something you want) The problem is the homogeneity of tech per sovereign.

1)If it is in every players best interest to trade tech indiscriminately

2)every player will trade tech

3)if every player trades tech

4)tech per sovereign will be homogeneous

5) if tech is homogeneous, why have tech?

This applies to multiplayer only on account of robots being stupid.

There are a couple solutions that don't require a re-working of the current scaling tech system which I was going to suggest in my other post but overall I hope the current tech system is scrapped.

In addition to the problem you identify, 2big2fail, which is that 

1) if trading tech has a huge advantage, everyone will trade, because if they don't trade, their neighbors will and they will fall behind, causing tech to be homogenous

There's also

2) The island problem: players starting in locations with fewer neighbors will have greatly reduced ability to acquire tech, resulting in regions of areas falling behind the larger regions

3) The gameplay problem: elemental is a strategy game, but do we want the dominating factor of that strategy to be how well you trade and control tech?

Which are things to keep in mind when talking about how to handle trading tech. I've had a few ideas, what do you guys think of them?