In this way, a veteran who's been playing for 2 years can still find happiness in allying with a newbie. The veteran has a 3000 score in research, but dropped two other scores to 0 to get that. He allies with the newbie who still has good scores in those areas. I waded back through that big thread and found the post you were referring to. The military was the easiest.
Economist also is easy to picture the penalties.
One of the toughest would be that you could not be in an alliance with anyone. Thoughts on this. You are the only one who can add or subtract from a particular alliance. This may not seem like much, I'll just get another member of that alliance to make me their ally. He would be limited to being able to control the units from the guy who invited him into the single alliance.