Diplomacy question and suggestion for devs

from Sins Forums
Ok, first the suggestion, the issue has supplanted the AI being stupid as the thing pissing me off the most when I play single player. :)

Some manner of seeing who likes who.  Civ4 style chart showing colored lines between them indicating war status would be more than sufficient.  If they cheat like a bitch and randomly ally with each other right off the start, I'll be able to tolerate it, but not knowing that all three of my neighbors are allies and having an alliance with one of them really makes the alliance rather pointless.  I might as well stick with a peace treaty and not have to worry about them declaring war on me when I drop to 70 favorability after two failed missions.

I've played through two large scale games now and they both broke down into a game where almost all the ai were allied with each other and the only two still at war were my own allies.  I couldn't get them to do anything because they liked everyone but each other, bloody wonderful.

Now the question.  How does the AI diplomacy work?  Finding three AI defending the same planet five minutes in is rather... irritating.  Do they have some sort of system for deciding things or do they just randomly request an alliance and go at it?  I've seen an AI bribe my aggression on the guy he's preventing me from attacking for the first diplomacy event.
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Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Diplomacy is a joke. It needs a full revamp. I don't know what they were thinking when they released it? Probably: this will sell, no one is going to complain the first few weeks.

Basic functionality such as who is allied/at war with who, research treaties (kind of pointless given the puny research trees), ship trade, espionage collaboration; oh wait, there is no espionage - instead we will have annoying little scouts lagging the game all over your empire as defenses struggle to catch them; also if you do destroy them then it will void all your hard work in getting friendliness to 35% and a chance to establish ceasefire (took them 3 patches to fix this, LAWL).

Come on IronClad, diplomacy needs to be on par with the quality of the Iron engine. Right now it's a mess.

Also fix research, give us a real research tree. 30% damage boost for the ENTIRE tree is a joke. There is no practical option to play high tech versus ship spammage. And this baffles me because unlike diplomacy, you definitely have the right setup for research.