If I'm not mistaken, in the first game you could allocate funds to espionage of the minor races. Also, you should be given the option to threaten the other civ's as well. For a race that wants to pick a fight with another, this is usually a preliminary step. In Civilization by Sid Meier you can demand things, and the more you demand the worse your relation gets. But you were also able to threaten them if they crossed into your zone of influence. I think being able to threaten war and declare war from the foreign diplomacy screen is another aspect that is missing.

Found another glitch in the updated version. I had just researched the right tech to build Rangers, and for some reason whenever I would select the ranger for building, it would show as if nothing was selected. But if I selected none, it would show that I was constructing a ranger. Basically, when you have the build ship menu open, it displays the stats and picture of the currently selected ship. Well, what it did to me was remove all that when I had the ranger selected. If I closed it, it would show a ranger being built, but it seemed to want to overlap it with the Nothing option for building ships. If I selected another type of ship that had its stats, it woud display it and build it. But when I went back to the nothing option, it put that a ranger was being built again. I will see if I can re-create this, it may have only been a one time glitch. But who knows, that's why I will check a second time.