To be blunt, diplomacy does seem unimportant at best, impossible in the long run.

While one can make some early agreements and a friendly relation lets you trade technologies, it is impossible, or close to it, to retain friendly relations. Goodwill earned drops within a few turns, a single diplomatic blunder and a somewhat friendly civilization will turn hostile, and towards the end game? Diplomacy no longer matters, since it is impossible to do a good deal. I do not know how I can say this more clearly, any good reputation you have earned melts away far too quickly.

Not to mention trading or dealing with other civilizations later in the game. Even if you have never harmed or hurt a civilization, as your influence and power grows it turns read due to "fear". This makes it impossible to trade with them. They will demand your two best colonies and a solid part of your treasury just to sign a trade agreement, or god forbid, free passage. Even if you intended not to conquer them, wanting to win by a counsil victory, they will now hate you, as will everyone else. Wronged or otherwise.

And this brings me to war. Even if you have a solid advantage, ten times the military power of any other species, and no one, or not even all of them at once, could hope to defeat you, one of them will threaten you with a demand, you will decline, and they will attack. Worse yet, as you decimate their fleets, they will not agree to any peace-treaty unless you give them an arm and a leg, pretty much like if you wanted to trade. Even when they have a single world left, your battlefleet hovers above it like doom incarnated, not even then will they contemplate peace unless you pay them with worlds.They never ask you for peace, they never offer to settle. They always demand, no matter how lost they are.

--

On a side note; they always exterminate each other. In two play-throughs I have never observed them conquer a single world of another species. They just bombard them until they are dead. In my second play-through I made a point of invading every single planet I took. Alas, the Psilons and Humans had been exterminated. From the Empires that had beaten them, not one foreign alien was found.
- This is sad. And to be honest, how hard can it be to tell the AI to build one or two troop transports, put them in their battlefleets and actually capture a planet now and then? There is a difference between the extinction of a civilization and the extermination of an entire species. Every species, even the Human Democracy, are homocidal space-nazis. If there is war, one species will cease to be.

Now, I know I have been very negative, so let me be a bit possitive. There are many aspects of this game that are excellent, and I like how you truly have captured the feel of the older games. The space battles, building an empire, it has been made right in so many ways. That said, the diplomacy, as it stands it seems like it belongs in the 1990s.

Hey there. Actually Diplomacy is far away from totaly useless. You just must be aware that your constant actions keep changing your relations with the other races. Its easy to piss them off. But if you are careful and keep them constant happy Diplomacy is very helpful in the game. I managed to win the game finaly with the Votes from the Sakkras after i helped them exterminate their enemies. While i had a Non Agression Pact with the 2nd biggest Power in the galaxy the Bulrathy. Diplomacy in this MoO is not a quick thing. You must consider the long term efffects.

I must disagree with you. I am aware of the useful sides of diplomacy, buying a vote, trading for a tech, open borders and so on. That said diplomacy is crippled by hostility. If someone becomes hostile to you it is almost impossible to win back their favour, and isn't that the true purpose of diplomacy?

If you go to war, or become attacked, the only way to end it is by either crushing the enemy faction completly or giving away a colony or two. The enemy race, no matter how badly beaten, will never offer you a single tribute for peace, or even an even peace. As such, unless you are willing to give away worlds diplomacy fails in its main task, promoting peace. The computer do not compromise. Diplomacy fails.

The same for late game trade if you are dominating the galaxy. It then becomes impossible to get a deal with anyone unless you pay huge sums of money and again give away worlds. The enemy factions are afraid, but unlike what one would expect this doesn't make it easier to achieve something, or get a favourable deal. No, it makes it impossible to get a deal. Instead of fear driving them towards the green bit, which would seem natural, after all you want to be friends with a big foe, but no, they go into the deep red.

I know I am reiterating my previous points, but that is how I feel about it. Diplomacy is only effective in the early game. Unless you slow down, stunt your own growth, purposefully remaining only slightly more powerful than the other races. Is that truly how diplomacy should work? No, diplomacy as it is now, is close to useless, only impacting the early one-third, or if you are lucky, half of the game. Then the galaxy will descend into unrelenting, unforgiving war and the races will start exterminating each other, and they will never offer you peace on their own accord, nor will they ever accept a fair peace offering under any circumstance.

This, to put it in its simplest terms, is wrong. Diplomacy is useless.

It still feels like Diplomacy is too much of a hassle. It's too hard to be diplomatic and too easy to be a warmonger. The game will actually push you to being a warmonger from early on, since unstable hyperlanes can not be overcome until much later in the game, while military outpost placement by the AI more often than not restricts you to a very narrow area of space. Getting an Open Border with the AI is nigh impossible. This restriction of one of the 4Xs, Explore, from very early in the game (by turn 40-50 you pretty much have explored all the area of space that you are able to) is a very cheap way to streamline the gameplay.

More or less +1.  

well so far.. ie not long.. I cant stop people from hitting border stations no matter how much i try n keep them happy.

 

Again tho dispomacy prob has a way to go

Diplomacy in its current state is unworkable. Limited-time treaties are awful. It's simply a waste of time currently as it's a lot of effort just to end up at war with other races anyway.

 

Agreed. I *seriously* hope this gets attention. Now, first off let me say I am immensely happy a remake of the legendary MOO is even being made, but there's always this risk that too much gets changed, or that something small one of us considered vital was changed instead.

 

Case in point, MOO2 (and to a lesser extent, MOO) could be played 100% successfully with a completely pacifist race with no combat ships at all. With the hardest difficulty (did that twice, the lesser difficulties many more times). By creating a race completely vested in diplomacy and using your friends and allies to fight your wars for you if necessary, you could opt out of the normal combative gaming style completely. It's been really sad that the Civilization series and all the others I've played since, have treated diplomacy as little more than a minigame for minor advantages during your usual raiding and pillaging. Same was true for Fallout. Fallout 2 could be played through with a charisma / intelligence medic character that after the first dungeon would literally let their party do *all* the fighting for them. But none of the Fallouts after that cared about it.

 

I really hope diplomacy gets a serious boost here. While I recognize it may not be realistic, considering our own history, I hardly believe it's harmful or unbalancing to the game if a race that sacrificed everything for diplomacy and support bonuses got some serious bonus to match that sacrifice too, instead of it all just boiling down to an all-out war eventually anyway.

hmm... I have gotten peace requests plenty of times when I'm stomping on inferior empires.

Diplomacy as I see it is in its second phase now and will be improved as the game gets more updates. At the moment there is no personality to the races, they act predictably and always the same.

 

 

Diplomacy - Phase 1 , the races meet at the beginning of the game

 

You have about equal colonies. Everything is wonderful, exchange embassies, have trade treaties etc. Your disposition is great. When you get a new tech you can trade it to them for cash. Which is usually great as the AI doesn't build the buildings, so it is essentially free money.

 

Phase 2 - You start to get more colonies and the negative trait the AI believes you are colonising too fast starts to appear on your disposition bar. This is very bad for you, and soon all races hate you and become hostile. Your closest ally if you have one, is you ally, but hates you bitterly and calls you names when you phone them up! All deals become impossible. If you get too far ahead, you get a special message from every race telling you to curb your ambitions. Most of the time they won't even take my calls anymore!

 

Phase 3 - You start to take over the galaxy and races become fearful. This is the best bit. Now they will speak to you and again call you names, but also recognise your greatness. Now you can demand stuff off them, not too much, they just say no. Once I got a colony, but usually you can get 20-50 BC per turn, techs and votes on the council.

 

The last 2 wars, when the AI was down to its last colony it asked for peace, which I summarily rejected due to lack of incentivisation and its poor attitude to our previous conversations.

 

During the last game, I built less colony ships in the mid game and focussed on expanding the worlds instead, and it definitely helped avoiding negative disposition. This allowed me to make alliances and keep the war from landing in my back yard. So I would not say diplomacy is useless. It just needs a bit of tweaking and testing.

 

As for allowing passage through space, I would like it if the devs make the AI very wary of this, as a human trick is to have an alliance then have free passage, then send your fleets to their worlds, break the alliance and destroy them. The AI is not cut out for such deception! haha

 

They could certainly try some subroutines where races that are allied or have non-aggression don't lose the plot when your empire starts to grow. The simplest AI reaction is to always seek parity, so if you start to expand to 13 colonies, it tries to create a similar sized block the simplest way possible, so there is always a counter weight, through AI alliances.

I like playing in a rather peaceful style.

Mostly because I dislike war, and war-faring, and usually It just becomes a general grindfest.

Therefore I do not really initiate wars, at all.

 

And because of that I find  diplomacy options rather limited.

 

I like to be a player in the shadows, you know. Hatching plots to take over nations and empires without a shed of blood. Or being that presence on the game, that insanely huge force in the background that sits in that corner of the map and silently dominates the whole universe with it's immense economic strength.

Stuff like that.

I kinda like to occupy small sections of the map and just build large alliances with various nations/empires, all the while having a smallish army/fleet.

 

Basically If you declare war on me, your whole economy will collapse and half the universe will be against you.

 

I'd like to do that in this game as well.

Edited by Bl4ckh0g, 17 April 2016 - 11:22 AM.

Played in the update. Diplomacy has improved slightly. You can see positive benefits but some crazy-making bugs or badly balanced aspects.

 

For example, an alien race will demand a credit payment to initiate a trade or research treaty. The amount claimed + setup cost is less than what I have in my reserve. However, when I accept the treaty and am returned to the galaxy map, I see that my credit score is now several hundred credits in deficit, i.e. I have a negative amount of credits, then I immediately lose a huge amount of starships.

 

No warnings, no feature to block the negative currency situation, and unless I have saved the game recently, I have a long way to go back. Basically it just annoys me so much I quit the game and go do something else for a while. This is very Not Fun.

 

However, if I DON'T try to make trade treaties, my rep with that race drops like a rock and I end up at war. Unfortunately, because the negotiation mechanics are so badly balanced I can't afford to keep enough races happy and end up at war with all of them, despite having been careful not to initiate any wars. Gifts don't seem to generate enough goodwill.

Try not expanding as fast, it worked for me. I concentrated more on developing the worlds I had before new colonies and I have only had one declare war. Basically by the time that my disposition was dropping due to expansion I had a very large advantage, so it did not matter. The other thing I did was colonise the best planet in each system, rather than grabbing all the best worlds straight away, the AI counts number of worlds rather than where they are, from what I can tell - with the exception of if you colonise close to them. 

 

However, the AI Klackon that declared war, made no sense. The Mrrshan had been destroyed in our war and this left many worlds ripe for colonisation, the Klackon's immediately sent their colony ships up there, but my colony ships beat them to it. Next thing you know they attack one of my systems with 99 Frigates, which was cool. However, they have about 10% of my military rating and 95% of my ships are on their border from the Mrrshan war - it seemed a bit suicidal. The only thing that saved them is the game has become very buggy and keep crashing, so it is taking a while to wipe them out. The battle against the Frigate swarm was good though, I lost about 20 ships as the AI is putting good stuff on their boats these days - class V shields, phasors and graviton beams. It seems when you attack a half built outpost it classes it as a colony, and the game does not like this at all (I have submitted a bug report)

One thing that I'd love is that my allies do not get angry with me for making a peace treaty with our common enemy.

Like please mate.

 

Also would be nice If we'd get positive bonuses for long term partnership and such

Ri'than watched with a mixture of anger and fear as the Mrrshan creature ascended to the podium. The open plaza was filled to the brim with Psilons that were milling about timidly, wringing their two pairs of hands anxiously and waiting for the speech to start and there was a palpable tension hanging in the air; the presence of the heavily armed Mrrshan guards clad in battle-scarred, surprisingly lithe (and obviously Psilon in origin) power armour didn't go unnoticed by anyone. There was something strange about the situation though, Ri'than realized slowly. The bipedal felines to a man looked disgruntled, but more than that, bored and disinterested. As if they had no desire to be there.

 

Well, maybe that was just the natural, post-battle depression claiming it's toll on the invading force. 'Serves them right', he thought as he straightened his jacket subconsciously and returned his gaze to the podium. The feline there, an officer of some sort, judging by the decorated uniform, was just about to start his speech. Ri'than held his breath. 'Here it comes' he thought. 'The demands. The cruel and despicable, senseless rules imposed by the victors'.

 

"Gathered inhabitants of Nordia Prime" it began. It's voice was raspy and rough, with a distinct, aberrant focus on certain sounds as was so common to the Mrrshan who bothered to learn to speak the languages of other races. It was reading aloud from a scrip that it was holding in it's hands, a gleaming holographic slate which had words hovering just a few centimetres away from it's surface. "Hear us now, for we are the Mrrshan, and through the honest and just dictations of combat we are now the rulers of this planet..."There was something else though, the Psilon observer slowly began to realize. The man sounded tired.

 

"...and in line with the rules passed down through our pride, the very scratchings in the sand that tells us our way of life, you are all now subjects to our rule and must follow our laws and regulations.."

 

There it was. This was it. This moment was going to shape his future. Ri'than swallowed dryly.

 

"...don't steal. Don't kill. Don't drink to excess unless it's in celebration of something" the cat's voices began to trail away as he looked up from his notes with an expression of dull exhaustion as he let his sharp but muted eyes trail over the gathered, confused crowd. He let the holographic notepad fall to the podium surface with a dull thud as he splayed out his arms in an perhaps exaggerated gesture of exasperation. "Frankly, I don't care. Just keep doing whatever it was you were doing before we got here and killed all of your 'soldiers'. This is the fifth Psilon planet brought to compliance as you all undoubtedly know, and as I speak the Mrrshan fleet moves to blockade your homeworld. Resistance is futile and really, you're only making a bad situation worse for yourself. A transcribed copy of the laws of the Mrrshan is available in any Alien Management Center. Just, I don't know. Pay your taxes and be good. Whatever"

 

A muted murmur of confusion had begun to arise from the gathered crowd of Psilons as the cat stepped away from the podium and soon both he and his honour guard left the area. Ri'than just watched in confusion. He couldn't quite grasp the significance of what that had just transpired here, but he knew that it was important.

 

*** 

Three hours later, the Psilon entered 'the Murky Mind'. A bar just outside one of the planet's many universities. He didn't normally frequent such places, but he had special reason to be there. He had heard rumours that the leader of the invading Mrrshan forces liked to hang out there, and he had more than a few questions burning in his expansive head that threatened to overwhelm him, and with a few resolute steps, he passed the softly sliding metal doors and entered the bar.

 

There were a scant few patrons in the place and the mood was subdued. A few Psilons were nursing drinks, and in the corner, far away from everyone else, Ri'than saw him. It was the same cat that had held the 'speech' at the plaza earlier. With is uniform opened up lazily, the man certainly looked dishevel as he sat alongside two guards, staring sullenly into his glass. The Psilon readied himself emotionally and began to approach the trio, and as he drew closer the two guards straightened out visibly and began to rise, hands on the pommels of their rifles but the officer just waved them down with a casual flick of his wrist. "If the man is here to kill me then let him come and doom his planet. I don't care". 

 

His voice was even raspier than before, tinged with the effect of alcohol. Almost reluctantly, the two guards sat down again. Ri'than steeled himself and began to open his mouth, but the officer cut him off. "Since you haven't drawn a weapon yet, I assume you're not an assassin. Sit down, ask your questions. You're not the first one of your kind to approach me today".

 

"My kind?" Ri'than asked, cautiously as he began to ease himself down into the seat, consciously aware of the guard besides him.

The officer looked up from his drink and eyed the Psilon slowly with a detached look, as if to say 'yeah, I see you. Nothing special, I've seen many like you before' before he spoke again. "Yeah. Psilons 'looking for answers'. You're wondering about the speech. About why we are here. About the war" At the last sentence, the man took a great big swig of his drink, whiskers wavering in the air with every motion of his throat as he gulped.

 

"Well, yes. I did have one or two- " Ri'than began anew, more than a little taken aback but was once again cut off. "You started it" the Mrrshan officer said sullenly. "You Psilons, I mean. Apparently you, or your leaders, didn't like that we were colonizing our own planets"

 

There was a dry note of sarcasm in his voice that was apparent even through his thick, feline accent as he slowly butchered the Psilon language. Ri'than balked. "What do you mean?! It was your war-mongering ways that-"

The officer slammed his hand into the table decisively to punctuate his statement, quickly silencing him and also cutting all the subdued background chatter in the bar as all eyes turned to them. "You. Started. It." he continued. "Have you thought about it? The war that is. What would it's -function- be. We Mrrshan are proud, I will readily admit it. But this is senseless. Have you even *looked* at a star map since the war began? Or at all?! We are on the opposite ends of the galaxy. There is literally thousands of light-years between us. Aeons of open, empty space."

 

The silence was so thick you could cut it with a rusty breadknife. The officer continued. "We have nothing to win by this. You people sent the first ships. I remember my grandfather used to tell me how great it was to have open contact with, not to say friendly relations with another sentient species. We used to have treaties for trade and research, did you know that? Years and years ago. But then something happened. When our two species made first contact, we Mrrshan had sent colony ships to four of our neighbouring systems. As it turns out, those systems were rich in planets, but we didn't have the resources to colonize them all at once, so we started small. Staked our claim."

 

He took another, more measured sip of his beverage and scowled. "Damned piss water this. Anyway. You did the same. We shared starcharts back then you know. Openly. You had five systems, we had five systems. And then, we made the mistake of colonizing the rest of our planets." the man's voice crew even sourer. He spoke with a measured, even pace, as if he had said the same thing many, many times before. "And you didn't like that. Not one bit. Felt left behind, maybe. I don't know and frankly I don't care. In my mind, if you own one planet in a system, you own them all. Obviously you people didn't agree now did you? So you declared war. It was abrupt and it took most of us by surprise. Now, don't get me wrong. A lot of us like it. We are just about evenly matched when it comes to technology, so it was an opportunity for many of our young ones to test their mettle against a proper foe. But me? I see the big picture. We are conquering you, and spreading ourselves thin because of it. And we lost a powerful friend in the process."

 

"I haven't seen my family in decades" he murmured, slowly as Ri'than listened on, speechless. For all of his vast intellect, this wasn't anything he had considered even briefly, to his great shame. "And for what? So we can superficially 'own' a bunch of Psilons on the [edited]-end of nowhere? It's pointless. Ridiculous. Especially considering that we were more or less allies before. No, you started this. This is your own doing. If it weren't for you and your planet-envy, I wouldn't have to see my men die while killing your soldiers."

 

They sat in silence for a while. Eventually, Ri'than got up and left. A few years later, the planet of Nordia Prime was in full compliance under the Mrrshan.

So this was based off of my first play-through, and it quite literally killed the game for me. Everything is looking -so good-, but the fact that all races that you've made contact with absolutely hate your guts as soon as you colonize a bunch more planets than they have, REGARDLESS of the fact that you can be literally on the other side of the galaxy and it's all just planets within systems that are technically yours already, it's just inane and it makes the AI seem petty and retarded.

 

In general this makes the diplomatic approach boil down to:

-Conquer 90% of the galaxy and make the others fear you

or

-Take meticulous care to pace yourself so that you never own more planets than the others until it's time for endgame

 

And I just aaaaaaaaah

On Topic, yep... they will hate you in the late game. This is not a paradox game, with deep Diplomatic/Social Design, even Vassal is not possible.

Just build up and crush em all, no friend zone established. Even the new neutral Planets will hate you later on, and the benefits are a laugh. +15 Research Points evry 10-15 Turns, i encountered 2 and played by the book, just for testing purpose.

Once again improved but still needs work. AI has a tendency to ask for everything you own even for a small trade. However, its easier to keep trade agreements going, which is a great improvement. Research treaties remain out of reach most of the time.

Yeah, I agree that it's pointless when everyone ends up hating you anyway.

Looks like I can't make a new topic (just registered) so I'll bring this up here:

What exactly triggers forming of the council? I've played a few games now trying to get a diplomatic win but the council meeting never appears. Is it required that every race has met every other race in the game or should it suffice that the player has met everyone else?? In my current game I have met four of the five alien races in the game - and I'm not going to meet the fifth because they're already extinct. It looks like this would happen quite easily in galaxies where passage to other edge of the map isn't available until unstable lanes become useful and by then there are other races in the way... Does anyone know how this is supposed to work??