Ok, anyone else having an issue with diplomacy.  Tried to join a three faction alliance and got denied, even though I'm on best terms with them all.  Tried joining alliance with each one seperatly with no luck.  Also I keep getting turned down on all tech swaps regardless of how far the bar moves to the right.  To top it all off I'm getting crushed by lumeris in influence. I've maxed on all influence techs and buildings but lumeris borders just keep inching more and more into my territory and if they research pacific conversion I'm done. 

I thought I read in another post that there were bugs in the diplomacy area, but I can't find the post 

I thought 3 was the max allowed in an alliance.

When in an alliance you get 2 "veto's" a friendly one & an aggressive one (making your allies act in a particular way to the factions they are used one.

In the diplomacy screen they are the little plus & minus icons.

MasterChief81 wrote:

To top it all off I'm getting crushed by lumeris in influence. I've maxed on all influence techs and buildings but lumeris borders just keep inching more and more into my territory and if they research pacific conversion I'm done. 

There are a lot of ways boosting influence. Do you have Spin Project or even Edenization on your planets in that system? Do you have a hero who boosts influence there? I think Counselors did that and there are some specific races with nice influence boosts, too (Cravers come to mind). 

Eden icense would provide a big base of influence for any system @ system developments. 

At last ressource, blockading the system could also help. 

What race are you playing? Some are weaker with influence than others.

I believe that the “+” means that allies will not take aggressive actions against them & the “-“ means that allies will not take friendly actions against them

The functionality of alliances feels a bit rough at the moment, and I hope that it's slated for another look at some point. Some sort of alliance voting system would be drastically better than the poorly documented war/peace veto system we currently have. Frequently I'll find one of my allies (no way to even know which one) switching from peace to cold war with another race for no obvious reason, and in the process chopping my trade routes off at the knees. Then I have to go back and bribe that other race to get back to peace and then bribe them back into the trade/science deals that I had with them. If nothing else, there should be a warning message before big changes like war/peace declarations or inviting another race into the alliance. Something like 'your alliance is about to do X' and then giving you a chance to drop the alliance and maintain your existing diplomatic stance if you don't agree with it.