I'm not really sure but it would be nice if there was an option of giving money to one race to give to another in exchange for something such as a peace treaty or even technology. Perhaps one race is unwilling to trade something to you but would do if another race asked.. sort of like indirect diplomacy..

The AI never asks for you to make peace with another race either.. At least they've never done it with me..

In my opinion the diplomacy could be improved a little. For example diplomatic relations only describe how they feel about you but you can't set how you feel about them. I know if you're powerful enough you'll get plenty of donations which is nice but it'd be cool to be able to use your diplomatic relations as a bargaining chip. It'd also be nice to be able to complain when the AI builds influence and military starbases near your territory and decides to take half it's forces for a stroll past your homeworld to attack your ally..

Relations like that are always bilateral. If the Yor have warm relations with the Dregin, the Dregin will have warm relations with the Yor. The same applies to you.

Paying one civ to attack or make peace with a second civ does not affect the second civ's relations with you, as they have no way of knowing who did it.

Neat ideas. Just to throw out a more complicated one (that could only possibly see the light of day in something as distant in the future as GalCiv3)...

One of the problems with the diplomacy system is that it's fairly easy to exploit the relations between races. You have a nice little indicator of whether they think you're the best thing since elvis or if they want to serve you as part of their next potluck lunch. It also doesn't translate well to the human player or (should multiplayer be involved) to competing players. If an AI has a high diplomacy value, the only thing the player notices is that the AI is harder to deal with, which seems a little counterintuitive.

My proposal is this: get rid of the relationship level (save as an internal AI value) and overhaul the political party system. Each party would have competing interests, and different opinions on different issues, and would have enough influence internally within a civilisation to cause trouble for the leader who doesn't bow to their wishes. The diplomacy ability, then, would be for keeping control of your domestic politics and possibly messing with the domestic politics of another civ!

Foreign relations would then become more rational, more of a poker game, instead of a collection of "does he like me" variables. The amount of diplomatic freedom a civ has would be dependant on how flexible they are in regards to internal politics. A civ that has all the parties under thumb would be able to make any deal they so please, while one without that control would have to take into account the consequences of pissing off the war party.

Without even going into the idea of race specific political parties, you could get a lot of interesting mechanics out of this. An economic party would be widely in favour of anything that improves GDP or the treasury, and wouldn't take kindly to you bartering the treasury away for a new set of missiles or declaring war on a major trade partner. They would, however, like the idea of you setting up more trade routes, increasing the population, or researching economic techs. Getting on their bad side would result in damaging your income or having to pay more maintainence. Conversely, a military dominance based party would love it if you declared war on a weaker civilisation or researched new weapons, but wouldn't particularily care for you ignoring their proposal to mount all government buildings with doom rays. Incurring their wrath would see them chatting to their buddies in the defense industry and kicking up the cost of ship construction and maintainence.

Each party would also be keeping track of what other civs are doing, and have opinions of them as well. If another civ opens up another front in a war on a civilisation that's beating the snot out of you, most parties would think more highly of them. Conversely, if that same civilisation opened up a war on a civilisation you were already dismantling, the war party would view them as dirty opportunistic warmongering alien scum who we should immediately declare war on while they're distracted.

Keeping track of which political factions like you and which do not, both within and without, could give you a lot of leverage in trade negotiations. Appeasing the war party of another civilisation could result in them pressuring their leader to hand over some nice military tech. Do things right (or pay off the right people) and you could turn another leader into a bit of a lame duck, or even create a vassal state that is theoretically independant.

You could also model public approval in an interesting way, too. Keep them happy, and they'll vote in a political faction that thinks highly of you, but keep them unhappy and they'll give your opponents more leverage. The mount of influence a party has will be determined at election time... once they have more of the senate, they get more noisy about their demands and more vindicative when they are not met, and the consequences become more dire.

It's a bit of an ambitious idea, but it'd certainly make galactic politics interesting and useful, instead of just a way to declare war and bludgeon some money out of a minor civ.

That's a cool idea. I haven't given much thought to what a truely "improved" diplomatic system would be, since it'll just get ignored anyway, but that sounds like a good start and is the kind of thing I'm talking about. OMG, if only we had gotten that instead of agents in the last expansion...

Unfortunately, it's development heavy enough that the chances of ever seeing it in GalCiv 2 are close enough to zero that it really doesn't matter, especially given the work that the espionage system and AI still need. Fun to think about, though.

Oh, yeah, that, absolutely. There are lots of small tweaks that'd improve the current diplomatic AI. Weighting military might partially by the success of the civ in war would also be helpful (if they win wars despite having a lower military rating, it might be a good idea to take that into account)... along with giving them the ability to know when they aren't doing that hot.

...I can't count the number of times that I've got a message along the lines of "have you come to grovel for peace?" when I've already taken over half their empire without losses.

Eh. Without a huge overhaul, I just find the UP to be little more than an random event that won't make a big change to the gameplay. Worst comes to worst, you lose your trade income to get around their stipulations.

I'd forgotten about the trade embargos... a neat feature that really, really doesn't serve a purpose as it stands. There seems to be a lot of those. It isn't remotely effective because you gain as much from the trade relationship as they do in most cases, and trade routes die off anyways if you're actually having bad relations with the civ because you're shooting at each other!

Embargos are only effective if done multilaterally, so paying off other races to stop trading with a race should be a valid course of action. That'd be a great way to cut off support of a civilisation you want to isolate economically and politically, and it'd be something you'd need to watch out for.

Something that'd also be nice is to have the AI handle deals across multiple turns. If a civ tries to bribe someone to go to war, they should be able to say "Hold that thought, give me a few weeks." They'd then be able to do thing like force the victim to pay whatever they were offered to stave off war, or warn them of the civilisation's intentions if they liked them enough. Heck, you could have things like "verbal agreement" treaties that you aren't forced to ratify, but that carry steep diplomatic penalties. For instance, an "I'll pay you x bc to go to war with him" could see you agreeing and then not going to war immediately. You'd have time to gear up your war machine and put your ships on their doorsteps, and then declaring war on your own time.

There's really a whole lot that could be done under even the current system, though I'll admit this is starting to sound like a bit of a rant.

Naw, the Drengin would be quite the opposite. They're ruthless and bloodthirsty, but they're anything but stupid. I mean, hell, they apparently were patient enough to wait tens of thousands of years for a stargate to fly its way down to the Torian homeworld at sub-light speeds in order to launch their invasion.

The Krynn are more of the "Jihad! Jihad NOW!" folk.

Never played the campaign mode, I just track down everything Frogboy/Draginol posts about the story.