| 
				 Re: Trading 
 Actually, I've found that trading ships seems to work well in .56.  For the longest time I tried to do an even exchange of colonization tech, and then I thought 'Well, if I can get his ship, I can reverse engineer it.'  It depends on the relative strength of the empires, but I managed to trade 3 ES scouts for 1 Gas Colony ship in the beginning part of the game.  Well worth it! 
				__________________-Mark
 |