Ok firstly my apologies if it seems I'm going on about this a bit - I think I've finally organised some rational thoughts.
I've been reading the AI posts by Draginol and I'm now partially informed as to what GCI did and what GCII will do in regards to military stuff and threat detection etc. I was impressed by some of the AI behaviours in GCI (surrounded by cloaked AI ships) and specifically the bit where the AI would send you a cheeky message letting you know that it was onto your scheme of building up a massive attack force before attacking.
However what I think might be missing is what I'm going to call an action-conseuqnce based diplomacy system.
Let me bring a few real world examples to the discussion. Imagine if a full USA carrier battle group popped up, unannounced, right off the coast of China in the vicinity of a major city... Well I think you can imagine the kinds of tensions that sort of thing would create.
On the other hand, if a Chinese spy trawler went missing off the coast of the USA, the chinese might suspect foul play on the part of the USA and tensions may rise a little, but without proof of any kind the incident would be written off as unfortunate collatoral expenses in what (hypothetically) amounts to an undeclared war.
However! If the carrier battle group arrived off the Chinese coast, and a number of Chinese vessels were suddenly lost at sea, then the combined significance of each incident may push tensions over the line into full blown war.
Action-consequence. These sorts of scenarios can be modelled in GCII by having diplomatic envelopes around each colony, starbase, and deep within each civilization's territory. These envelopes define an area of space in which certain actions will trigger relationship "hits"; the relationship between two civs is "soured".
For example parking your medium range sensor barge (perhaps the equavalent to a spy trawler) inside the diplomatic envelope of a rival civ will have a slight negative impact on the relationship between you and the target civ.
But parking a battle fleet in the same place will have a more dramatic effect on the relationship. Parking more ships / fleets in a number of envelopes will probably sour the relationship to the point of war. And rightly so don't you think? There are not many friendly interpretations one can derrive from a rival civ building up battle forces within easy striking range of your colonies, is there?
The system needn't be so black and white. Parking a ship wihtin the diplomatic envelope can be insignificant in certain circumstances. The envelopes can be layered, like an onion, with the inner rings more sensitive to action, and the outer rings less so. Furthermore the sensitivity of the envelopes is dependant on your initial relationship with the civ (before you moved within the envelopes). After all, you may be sending lots of ships into one civ's space in order to help him defeat yet another civ.
It might be that more treaty options are available, in that if a civ wants your help or you want to help one of you has to ask for a kind of "diplomatic immunity" treaty which enables ships to move about inside the envelopes without fear of souring relations.
The utiltiy of this system allows for some interesting scenarios to be played out. For example building up a huge military force within the envelopes might allow you to genuinely intimidate a rival civ into acceeding to a demand you want to make. This is called bullying and naturally is not received very well by the person being bullied. Now what we have here is a demand with has been accepted only because your actions could result in an unfavourable consequence for your rival civ. Furthermore the immediate and probably medium term consequences of actions have been a dramatic lowering of the relationship.
Another example. The consequence of the act of moving large amounts of military hardware into a rival's "territory" (envelopes) is a lowering of the relationship. If your presence continues for long enough (dependant on the power you have mustered) war is inevitable. Building a military base within rival space would also be looked upon most unfavourably.
I've touched on this one before but I'll keep it all in one space. The envelopes would be most sensitive to decisive actions. Destruction of rival ships within their envelope may or may not result in war depending on which ring the incident occured in, what sort of ship was destroyed, and maybe some other appropirate factors. If it didn't result in immediate war, it certainly would lower the relationship dramatically. But if you destroyed the same ship in deep space the relationship hit wouldn't be as severe.
The AI would have to be sensitive to your envelopes. It would have be fully aware that setting up resource starbase that was clearly within one your envelopes would sour relations. It would have to consider the problem carefully. Imagine China setting up a state owned oil rig in US territorial waters, and shipping that oil directly to its military units.
