The problem is that this "retal option" can also be used as a "suicide option". I agree that it gives a bottomfed country 0 effective retal options, but without the change, the large country had 0 effective anti-suicide measures from getting 100k tech stolen a day. The tech stolen per turn is more than what most techers even tech per turn. The moment you retal twice, they blow up 10k buildings and 2m jets.

The removal of Offensive alliances was another example. While it gave smaller countries the ability to retal better, ultimately, top players were abusing it to get a competitive edge by having large all-jetter O allies. This advantage is significant enough to snowball a top 20 player to become a top 5 player unfairly.