Bring on the sabre rattling! I WANT the AI to know when I'm mad at it but not (yet) enough to go to war over it.

You can already do this. Just don't put anything in the trade dialog to trade with.

Ah, well I did notice that but it always seemed a bit.. empty to me..

GCII diplomacy does seem a bit bland and rather black and white for what amounts to a normally complex, intriguing, and interesting facet of inter-state relations. The game isn't designed to be a diplomatic simulator, but there are some yawning gaps.

Like the OP i would like to be able to explicity say "listen pal... I know we're good mates but surely you've noticed a heap of my frieghters visiting those minor race planets you're systematically exterminating? How about you stop doing that? If you don't I'm just going to set this phasor here to 'kill', mmmkay?" This sort of bullying would naturally mean the relationship takes a hit. On this flipside, bribes would have the opposite effect.

(I like trading with minor races because they their personalities are more stable than major races.)

I'd _like_ to see more facets built into the diplomacy system. For instance there exist in several parts of the world today unoffical wars where the two combatants haven't declared war on each other but nevertheless fight small skirmishes. Would be nice to be able to have a cold war, as such, with a neighbour rather than an outright vaporisation session. For example destroying a rival's constructor deep within your own terrority or in unobserved space, both of which are probably not within that rivals direct sensor range, should incurr a relationship penalty, not trigger an outright war.

If however you destroyed that same ship within clear and direct sight of its owner, a war most certainly would brew up. The hit to relationships would be proportional to the importance of the ship (flagships being important, and colony ships following closely). Naturally the other races are allowed to do the same to your ships.

Additionally I've noticed the AI appears to have a 3 second memory. I once gave a "close" neighbour 2000bc to make peace with a minor race which he agreed to, only to have him continue the attacks the very next turn. That's broke.

Basically I'm saying relationships are far far more complex than the implementation is GCII, and while nobody could expect that complexity to be modeled, I reckon that more detail does need to go into the system. This is especially the case if a player wants to run an _interesting_ non-military strategy.

Like the OP i would like to be able to explicity say "listen pal... I know we're good mates but surely you've noticed a heap of my frieghters visiting those minor race planets you're systematically exterminating? How about you stop doing that? If you don't I'm just going to set this phasor here to 'kill', mmmkay?" This sort of bullying would naturally mean the relationship takes a hit.

Heh. I liked the way you worded that, rogerano. Good points, though. I have yet to see an PC empire-building game where the diplomacy really approached anything resembling "realistic" (that being a relative term, of course). Now I'm certainly not expecting GalCiv 2's diplomacy system to be everything I could possibly dream of, but I really hope they'll update it and add more options after the game is released.

The example you used was particularly apt. I can't remember how many times I've wanted to tell a neighbor, "Hey guy, I'd really appreciate it you'd leave Nation/Race X alone, as they're pretty good friends of mine. Now I realize you two have had your differences, and I completely respect that. If you'll let me buy you a round of drinks (and maybe give you that weapons tech you've been wanting from me in exchange for forfeiting your claim to that disputed planet on our border), I think we can all come to an equitable agreement. If you just give me the finger and ignore my very reasonable request, however, then things are going to get awfully physical between us, and I'm not referring to sexual chemistry!"

In an ideal world, that's the kind of messages I'd like to be able to send to other factions/races--except more tactfully worded, of course.

After release much becomes possible. But for the initial release, exploitation concerns have to take precedence.

Hey, totally understandable. I'm just glad you guys are so good at adding new stuff, and not *just* fixing bugs.

I think GalCiv II's diplomacy is pretty sophisticated as-is though, particularly compared to other contemporary strategy games in the same genre.

Oh, I'm not complaining, believe me! The diplomacy system in the original game, while somewhat odd at times (for want of a better word), was still pretty good overall; and I know you guys have worked hard at improving it even further for GalCiv 2. I was more just expressing (rather wistfully) an example of my "ideal" diplomacy system.

(I know, I know: "If wishes were horses".....)

One of the biggest efforts behind the scenes is that the diplomacy system reacts differently depending on who you play as and who you are talking as.

In GalCiv I, we had it easy -- you played as the humans always.  Now, you can play as any of 10 different civilizations and we wanted the diplomacy to come across differently depending on who you play as.

I just hope ya didn't forgot to do that for 'me-made' race too