Summary: There needs to be diplomacy status points given for gifting a star system, liberating a star system, or gifting technology. If you gift or liberate systems next to your territory it should negate the neighbouring territory penalty (which is huge).



Scenario: Your nation and another nation are at war with the same enemy. This enemy declared war on both of you at different times. The enemy has taken many of the other nation's systems. During your conquest of the enemy nation you start taking systems that the enemy took from your partner nation. Instead of keeping those star systems you decide to gift them back to your partner nation. There are no bonuses (which should be quite significant) for performing such an action. Instead the now neighbouring nation starts to dislike you because you have territory close to them despite being an avid ally.



It is also interesting to note that there are no diplomatic bonuses for protecting an ally nation. I have sent my fleet to destroy their enemy trying to capture a system and gain nothing from that.

I often gift systems to my weaker allies. If I'm in an alliance, I want to reap trade benefits. If I expand drastically more than they do, the game's trade system ensures that I don't get the full benefit from new systems. So... I settle or conquer systems near allied space and I gift them over. This makes the ally more useful to me and enhances the power of trade improvements in my empire. With a great many trade bonuses in a system, each trade route I can add to it is several dozen dust and research per turn.



It's still probably not as powerful as just keeping and working the system up for myself, but I find gifts like that more emotionally satisfying. I like trade and I like helping my allies. If only the AI were willing to trade systems for systems... I'm occasionally in the position of being willing to hand them several heavily developed systems in exchange for a single system of their own if that system is in a strategic position and controls rare resources.



I didn't even notice that the AI wasn't giving me any deference for all my system gifts. If it's really like that, it needs fixed.

Yeah, I noted this on the alpha already and first wanted to check if the beta still had this problem. I too think that it is stupid not getting any benefit for protecting another players systems from invasion (meaning: destroying the attacking fleat and leaving the system without touching it myself) or for gifting them valuable items (planets or tech).



@Platescale: How can you mantain alliances? The diplomatic system is such an unfinished feature, I only can go to war with all other players. I had multiple peace treaties and they where all converted to wars by the AI resulting in a galactic everone vs. everyone. I really think one should get some kind of reputation points for:

- never breaking a treaty / deal

- accepting "cease fire" offers

- never declaring war first



And I think that reducing neighbourhood to border conflicts does not make any kind of sense. It maybe does for some races but definetely not in all cases. At least not at game difficulty normal or lower.



@Moderator: Can you give us a description of how the diplomacy system is supposed to work right now and what is planned for the final release, please?