[dogscoff]

The first trick is to make them a firm offer - don't let them offer you stuff. Rather than trade tech directly, I prefer to trade ships and then analyse them.

I never research ship/ component techs against the AI now (although I rarely use trade exploits either) I let the AI research all the ship construction, weapons, sensors, shields etc while I work on intelligence, boarding parties and troops. When I start falling behind in tech, I just steal or trade a few ships and catch up.

It's an exploit because the AI won't take the components of a ship into consideration when trading - in other words, the AI thinks his top of the range cruiser loaded with tons of spanky high tech weaponry is a fair trade for your two grubby old DUC destroyers and 5000 organics.

Furthermore, the AI doesn't learn from bad trading experiences, and doesn't care if the ships you are offering are out of supplies in a black hole system on the farthest side of the map.

Try building two useless, empty escorts at the beginning of the game. Offer them to a friendly AI in exchange for a coloniser and he _will_ accept. I don't know exactly how the calculation is performed but I'm fairly sure it's based on tonnage.



------------------
"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"I think so Brain but, if you replace the P with an O, my name would be Oinky, wouldn't it?"