BrigadierBill

I usually have both tech available for trade and high diplomacy tech, so even when my military is pretty small I can usually get tech trading to work on the various "normal" difficulties (normal through gifted). Genius might make them more unreasonable, so I could be wrong about your particular case, but I have noticed certain trends: 1.) Certain techs are considered high-priority by the AI above and beyond their inherent research cost, particularly military techs. This actually isn't