UP Question

Still just random ones that come up. Although, Frogboy has expressed a desire to add player proposed elements or the ability for the player to see and influence the proposal ahead of time. I imagine it would be hard to let the AI do the same thing to. He is real big on the AI being equal to the player and he wont add something the AI cant do competently.

You could do that In Alpha Centauri. Propose votes and influence allies on future votes. I kinda liked that. Might have some balance issues but I'd like to see that Gal Civ.

a good way to implement such a system would be to have a chairman of the UP. You could make it either a rotating chairmanship (like the EU presidency) or an elected chair (like the UN in Civ 4) or the chair could be the major race with the highest influence. The chair would then have the authority to table a resolution for a vote. In the interests of balance (not to mention variety) you could make it so once a resolution has been voted down it cannot be reintroduced for (say) 5 sessions. Also I think it would be a good idea to let the chairman put existing laws to the vote in order to have them repealed

To improve diplomacy you could set up the UP screen so that you could click on a race portrait to start diplomacy with them, but in addition to the standard tradeables there would be a "vote" section containing items like "Vote for A", "Vote for B" etc. That way you could buy alien votes.