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.
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