I've played GalCiv 1 and found the diplomacy section extremely lacking, the treats it offers to the user are pretty much limited. The feature allowing you to demand items or trade items is very good but besides that there is little you can do.

In MOO2 you could establish military / ecomonic / research treaties that helped your civilization a lot. In GalCiv you only really have access to military treaties and they do very little for you. In MOO2 a military treaty gave you access to allies planets for refilling and repairs, in GalCiv this is not the case. The research and economic treaties were VERY important since they could give your civilization a huge boost. In GalCiv you rely on freighters to establish direct trading routes between worlds.

I think more treaty options should be available to the player and the AI, I also feel that manner in which you communicate with the other races should be taken into consideration. If I am an EVIL badass empire and demand a planet off a weak 2 planet empire, I expect them to give it to me. I don't expect them to say "And thats fair how?", the point is that it isn't fair thats the whole point, me big and bad, you small and weak, you do as I say or you die! >

I also like to partnership alliances, I have heard something about this but it doesn't sound like what I have in mind. Imagine 2 races growing influence and power through continued cooperation, imagine the treaties changing over time representing the different states, like Non-aggression pact, ecomonic treaty, research treaty, military alliance, alliance, partnership. When they get to partnership the 2 empires merge into a new super empire, obviously this would be controllable by the player. The new empire would have access to everything of the 2 empires, but a new level of government would be applied. So instead of the Terrans ruling the partnership it would be run using a combined new government voted for by the new citizens. So If there was a Terran / Torian partnership, the population could vote to either go with Imperial type government or Republic, then depending on how that turns out, another vote is handle to determined what party to use.

The partnership would combine the two empires with HUGE bonuses, but would have serious disadvantages as well, like harder to control citizens since you have interspecies relations to take into consideration. Low birth rates, since you'd have a huge empire to control and people would slow down on the breeding to save on space.

You get the general idea. So what do you think?