Sounds good to me.

I would think this could be easily accomplished with a simple data flag on each tech to indicate whether it was 'researched' or not.

Creating the often requested 'no-tech-brokering' game option would create and use this same exact data, so why not make it more interesting?

I really like this idea!

I always play with no tech brokering. Tech trading yes, but no tech brokering...

I don't think so. Near as I can tell it'd require dev intervention.

Well, ill be the first to say, that I dislike this idea. 

While I'm not a realism fanatic, the idea that you get benefits from a tech and can employ it, but still have to research it and don't really understand it, is counter intuitive. 

Maybe if the tech was discounted in research by half it would be ok. To represent the fact that we would always be reverse engineering any technical assistance. 

I initially thought the same but then I started to think of it more like an "imported work force". Say you license someone one of the farm techs - the way I see it is you are borrowing some workers from that civilization for the period of the license who come out and build those farms for you. Yes, you would eventually be able to reverse engineer it but that takes resources and time as well (hence the reduced cost of researching it yourself). You don't just get handed something and immediately understand the concepts of how it was created.

Same with say, beam tech. I imagine it is something more along the lines of they have agreed to train you in the use of those weapons and supply them for a cost (signified by the manufacturing cost you pay when installing - sure not 100% accurate but close enough) so you can use them. You don't however immediately understand how they work/are created.

I think that normal tech trading should be retained alongside the licensing system. Sometimes you may want to genuinely jump-start a race in order to serve as a buffer between you and another empire, become an improved trading partner, etc.

Quite correct, that is what I get for reading/posting on the train!

"If you can use a tech, you must understand the tech"

You need to know that when I read this... my head translated it into:

"To Defeat the Bug! We must Understand the Bug!"

Followed by... "We can ill afford another Klendathu"

I then cheered. Kudos to those who get the reference

So I can tell the US military not to worry about selling China the blue prints for patriot missile systems! They will be so happy to hear that lol.

Hard drives are made in Thailand because of the economics, and Thailand manufacturers have little economic incentive to develop new drives (probably the opposite, as new drives might mean new equipment/technique/etc. which have costs).

There is a entrenched innovation industry in the US and other places, and as a result, other companies don't chomp at the bit to challenge it. Its a bit like incumbents in elections.

Your example is a factor of globalized capitalism, and it doesn't show that Thai corporations don't understand (or couldn't incredibly quickly figure it out) how their hard drives work. They also have no reason to care unless they choose to compete.

Remove the entrenched industry players though, and you would see many new companies all over the world start investing in R&D on hard-drives.

And, its all not representative of what we are talking about. We are not talking about corporations whose only goals are profit, we are talking about civilizations, or at least governments and their millitaries, who have a VERY vested interest in understanding any new technology, even if it isn't exactly profitable. While certainly the other party would try to limit how much we could reverse engineer something they sell us, its unlikely to succeed. Look at nuclear proliferation for example, despite massive efforts to prevent this technical understanding from spreading, it is. 

Galciv's universe in my opinion is:

1) Not as economically globalized as Earth

2) Culturally less homogenized than Earth (maybe Earth today has the same variety, but not in scale, all major world powers today, are capitalist-ish, few operate at the sort of extremes you have in GalCiv, and those that do, do not do so on an even footing)

3) Due to the accelerated aspects of advanced technological, its historical time frame is accelerated. IE, 100 turns in GalCiv might be a few years of realtime, but the historical comparisons and effect would be closer to 100 to 200 years of real earth history. Which makes it unique.

These factors leave any comparison to "today", less than ideal, and comparisons to anything less than government level organizations inappropriate. GalCiv's factions are more akin to imperialist nation states and the like anywhere from 1500AD to 1914AD. But the pace of events is much more rapid.

Personally, the idea of licensing with a 50% gain of the tech is growing on me. But, ultimately, tech trading is not a bad feature, it is a standard element of many 4X games, it doesn't add anything significant to the game that is "fun" (it fixes one small complaint about tech specializations which would be better fixed by letting you reject gifts, which is needed for other reasons), and its going to be counter-intuitive to new players. If I were the designer I'd quickly triage this idea into the "Kinda nice, but we will never have time for"

One example would be diesel engines, which were developed in Germany and licensed to manufacturers in other nations (the US and UK among others). Scientists in both countries understood how diesel engines worked, but their attempts to make their own were not always successful. So there were parts of the manufacturing process that were, if not secret, at least closely held - or not understood without lots of experience with diesels.

If I recall correctly, enemy firms were paid after the World Wars for equipment built under license. So a better formula might be to 'sell' the tech with payments over time but only permit a few uses of it (or a percentage of its effect) until the tech is fully paid for. I think this would be most useful for techs specific to a race or faction.

I don't really see how this is relevant to the discussion tbh. It's exactly the same whether you use a license model or a direct trade model in this instance - if you don't want to trade them to others, then just don't sell them the license in exactly the same way you presently don't sell them the tech.

Also, the reason the US doesn't sell arms to China is due to the post-Tienanmen Square arms embargo. From 1980-1989, both Europe and the USA sold vast amounts of high-tech weaponry to China, and would probably still be doing so (like Russia quite gleefully does, despite seeing China as their biggest security threat - and in fact China still acquires lots of US weapons systems via Israeli licensing and on-sales).

Alright then. In the 1500s, Europeans sold guns to the Native Americans. Three hundred and fifty years later, not one Native American nation had developed an arms industry capable of producing a single original rifle, even though they used them in large numbers. If you want to design a decent gun, you need to have a good understanding of several different sciences - metallurgy, ballistics, chemistry, engineering, mechanisms. And that's really just a sealed tube with gun powder in the end - consider how many different sciences you need to know to design a microprocessor, or an aeroplane. Are you putting all of that stuff into the box?

Also, your argument kinda supports my point that real-world tech transfers occur through a system much more like licensing and much less like diplomatic tech trades. 

Well, I'm already sending out massive freighters full of something or other, so why not arms? Why would I be willing to ship over a thousand tons of clothing, but when it comes to my latest top-secret weaponry plans I'll just give them away instead? 

Or if you want to go the transmission-only approach, why not send him limited use 3D printer files? Just add a destructive read subroutine; this can already be done with modern equipment. Send him 50 Read Once blueprints a week until I decide to stop doing so. And why are you assuming I'm only interested in selling licenses to my enemies? I'd sooner sell licenses to everyone. I have permanent interests but no permanent allies

Besides, I may be 3 or 4 tiers of tech ahead of some AIs who I wish to sell licenses to. This is selling rifles to the natives again. Quite frankly, there's nothing to say you won't get Doom Rays before the other guy has picked up Matter Disruption; it's likely to rely on branches of science the recipient hasn't even heard of yet. Kinda like an inverse Outside Context Problem; the weapons are so powerful that the recipient can't even begin to understand them. He just knows that they come out of his primitive 3D printing device and work. 

Well, it's got potential to help with diplomacy, which is currently massively crap and is exactly one of those things that does need sorting ASAP. If diplo wasn't screwed up already, then I wouldn't be suggesting changing how it works to improve it. Licensing as a tech trade system has been tried in other games, and worked well; it prevented the worst excesses of player tech trade abuse while still permitting the player to pick up advanced tech from other players.