Diplomatic Treaties

Diplomatic Treaties

Civilizations can trade resources and form treaties with one another through the Diplomacy screen. Once the Universal Translator Tech has been researched, the player can examine any Civilization encountered out in the galaxy and initiate diplomatic dialogue with them too.

The left pane of the Diplomacy screen shows a quick summary of their relative power to the player's Civilization, including their Civilization Abilities, Biology, Cultural Focus and AI Personality. Diplomats can be examined and assigned here too.

The right pane shows a picture of all the Leaders of all the Civilizations discovered so far in the game, and hovering over a Civlization Leader’s image brings up a tooltip which shows all the current Diplomatic modifiers affecting your mutual relations. Examining this information is critical to discovering how the AI is feeling about the player and the player’s actions in the current campaign, and can help inform strategies towards either raising or lowering those relations as required.

Clicking on the Diplomacy Graph will show existing Treaties between the known Civilizations in the galaxy. Trade between Civilizations is indicated by a yellow line, Allies are linked by a green line and Civilizations at War are linked by a red line. Clicking on a rival Civilization will show all Treaties shared with other Civilizations, and the Show All button will show all Treaties currently active in the game.

Clicking the Trade button brings up the Diplomatic Trade screen, where the two Civilizations make offers of Credits, Diplomatic Capital, Treaties, Strategic Resources, Techs and Ships. When selecting the amount of Credits or other resource for a proposed trade, the player can click and manually enter the value with the keyboard, can click on the arrows to increment/decrement the value, or hovering the mouse over the value and scrolling the mouse wheel can rapidly increase or decrease the value too.

The two colored bar above the dialogue box shows the balance of the deal so far, and represents how the rival Civilization’s Leader feels about the deal. This bar must be balanced for the deal to be acceptable to the opposing party, and their general feelings about your Civilization will determine how likely they are to accept a deal too. If your previous dealings have been good and your relations are high, the Leader is more likely to accept risky or less advantageous deals, with the opposite true for lower relations, where the AI is much less likely to want to trade Techs that could give the player an advantage over them.

There are many Treaties to unlock and engage in with rival Civilizations, the most common are as follows:

• Peace Treaty - ends a war.
• Open Borders - allows a Civilization’s ships to pass through your territory without diplomatic penalty.
• Non-Aggression Pact - Both sides agree not to declare War on one another.
• Declare War On - Convince the other Civilization to declare war on a third party.
• Embargo Third Party - the other Civilization will dissolve all Trade Routes with the third party.

Finally, the player can click Speak To and enter into a dialogue with the Civilization. The options here as as follows:

• Enter the Diplomatic Trade Screen.
• Formally Declare War.
• Proclaim Friendship for a diplomacy boost.
• Demand the removal of their Ships from your territory.
• Demand or offer a monthly credit payment as tribute.