It seems that the game does only know two states of relationships: Friend or foe with foe being the default state. Thus scouts entering your system tend to disrupt your economy through blockades and even stage early invasions right after finding you.



In my opinion scout ships should be lightly armed and receive a major penalty to invasion strength, they should be subject to interceptions, gain a huge radius where they can detect things. However they should not be able to blockade.



Now here's something which would probably make it partially unnecessary:



Neutrality as a concept should exist and should be the default state. When a player A encounters player B the first time then this round would be free. During this round both parties unless engaged will remain neutral. From there on every further staying within that territory should slowly incur a penalty depending on the military power of that fleet to the violating side leading up to hostility and thus eventually leaving neutrality status. This of course could be overridden through an Open Border treaty.



A blockade should differ from an invasion in that it does not engage in ground and ship combat.

An invasion should always trigger ship-to-ship combat.



Scout, or ships fitted with scouting or civilian module should not be capable of blockades and thus not invasions and their military power should be greatly reduced but remain at a minimum of 5 (arbitrary value, just something greater than zero).

Troop carriers, or unarmed ships fitted with an invasion module should not be capable of blockades.

Both ship types should be susceptible to intercepts unless friendly.

carriers are a good thing. maybe with advanced invasion modules and ground fights (more variables including armored vehicles infantry elite infantry and planes)

Sounds reasonable. Though scout ships might instead get something that makes them able to dodge intercepts at the price of being unable to blockade or attack.

Reminds me of yesterday when i made peace with the other race and suddenly their scout tries to steal my planet and i could not travel to the system i own. So i broke to contract and went at war again.

Added to the summary suggestion thread /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/13003-summary-of-suggestions-so-far-discussion

The community as a whole seems to really want more in-depth detail regarding ship classes and combat. My head keeps going back to that old game, Homeworld...

But anywho, I definitely agree that neutrality is a must have. If having trade routes did much of anything I'd be more worried about the blockade action but for now, a neutral state with the ability to gift things to improve the relationship would be nice.

Moved to the proposals section, refused as per the tracklist of the devs.

Its even more fun when they can blockade your system but because of cease fire you cannot kill the blockading scout/fleet.



So what part of this proposal did they refuse? It looks like it has multiple suggestions.

Uberbasher wrote:
Reminds me of yesterday when i made peace with the other race and suddenly their scout tries to steal my planet and i could not travel to the system i own. So i broke to contract and went at war again.

true specially funny when you race has "eternal war" and can not attack a leftover fleet that is blocking a conquered planet or you actually have to declare war to attack scouts in your own territory

Uberbasher wrote:
Reminds me of yesterday when i made peace with the other race and suddenly their scout tries to steal my planet and i could not travel to the system i own. So i broke to contract and went at war again.

That is an "outpost inside (allied) enemy territory" issue, not a scout blockade issue.