Tech Trade by Wolf-Lamb

The wolf/sheep concept relies on the fact that a player with a warship (wolf) present at a battle in which a ship (sheep)with superior tech is destroyed stands a chance of gaining a tech level. With scrapping, you can attempt to transfer tech to a single ally. By arranging to have the ship killed, rather than scrapped, where 2 or more allies are present, each of them stands a chance of gaining tech. Thus, this is often the tech trading technique larger alliances favor.

Since, presumably, the parties involved in the scheme have each other set to friend, the wolf ships must have their battle orders explicitly set to attack the player providing the sheep. For this reason, the sheep donor should take care not to have any ships present other than the sheep due to be destroyed.

Example

Races A, B, C, and D enter into a tech trading alliance. Each race produces 6 'wolf' ships. They each split these ships into two fleets of three, and send each fleet to an uninhabited planet near their homeworld. Once there, the fleets are split, and one wolf from each fleet is given to each of his allies. Now there are eight sheep/wolf sites; each player has a ship present at six of these sites, and prepares to send sheep to the remaining two.

All players give their wolves orders to attack only the player who is about to start sending sheep.

The players discuss amongst themselves who shall specialize in what fields, and start building two sheep per year, and sending them off to the nearby sites.

Eventually, players may wish to send wolf ships of their own to each of the sites, so that they can clear up some ship slots.

In this way, each player has 6 chances to gain tech, at the cost of two sheep, each year.

This is cheaper and easier than managing scrapping. On the downside, you don't have control over which field you try to gain in a given year.