Obviously, you need to keep them alive long enough for you two to get to "close" relations.

I know when I managed to beat the mission, the Iconians had many times asked for help, and I offered ships. That would give you a + for "appreciate past help" or something like that.

Perhaps you can give them some gifts to get them to friendly relations sooner.

I do recall focusing all my efforts in a single direction to get control of one side of the map. That pretty much protected the Iconians from attack as the Korath and Yor needed to get through my territories to attack them.

I don't know what else I can say beyond that. I'm currently replaying the campaign again so I'll make a point to check back once I beat that map again. Lets us know if you beat it before then. By the way, if all else fails, you could set the AI to drool mode so the Iconians live for a very long time.

I know there is another + for "historic friendship" that you gain after some time (~2 years) at peace with each other.

You could get another + (to make ++) for military rating if you ramp that up a bit.

Looks like you've done all the necessary things. Now you just have to wait. On harder levels, the wait is longer.

There is a cheat, but it isn't needed. What all pluses and minuses are you seeing with them in your game right now Tridus?

Then you may just have to ride the game out a couple more turns until you get "past friendship together" or such for another + as said in the followup posts in the thread.

You also remembered to give them Alliances tech right? Just so you don't need to wait to toss that to them when the time comes...

Okay, I am also stuck in this scenario. I have done all of the above, waited it out for MANY turns, gave away planets, cash and trade goods, deactivated my entire fleet(though I am still getting a negative on military strength) I am not sure what I can do to change the "Close borders" negative, or the "We know what you are doing" negative. have all treaties active, trade is good, there are no enemies ( I eliminated them all) but the feelings have not moved at all. Could the upgrade from 1.95 to 1.96 have stuck the game in a loop? Any help here would be appreciated

I started an own post but cant transmitted my text, so I will trying it here,
unless I don't know if this has to do with the tactic problems in this scenario:

There is a typo in the TACampaignText_06_Rock&HardPlace.xml

I found it in the file .../Data/English/Campaigns/TACampaignText_06_Rock&HardPlace.xml (still in TA 1.96.027)


at the end of Line 10:

Text Greetings YourLeaderName. The SPEAKING_RACE_NAME hope to have a lot of contact with your species. /Text /Text (originally inclusive brackets)



As you can see the end tag text inclusive brackets is twice a time in there.

I haven't a clue whether this typo can cause any oddities or not.

But in any case this double entry can be managed by using any non-RTF editor, like notepad.

Too large a fleet is never a negative. The militaristic tag comes from your history of finishing off other races. To avoid it, finish races off by culture-flipping their last planet. You can horribly slaughter the first 99 planets, but somehow people get upset at the last one.