[Suggestion] Breaking Non-aggression pact

I agree. Nations break treaties as and when it suits them, why shouldn't races? Of course, your standing in the UP should take a dramatic turn for the negative but if you think it's best for your race to break that treaty, I think you should be allowed to. Mind you, if you were able to make other races go to war against the race you've got the non-aggression pact with, that whould help A: Beat that race and B: Lessen - or maybe even avoid - disapproval in the UP....

I disagree. What good would non-aggression pacts be in that case? Useless.

By default, you are already in a permanent cancellable non-aggression treaty with every race.

If the negative diplomatic hit is high, then it leaves you essentially at war (or at least unable to trade) with the rest of the galaxy, which is significantly different than the neutral state.

If you are at the point in the game where you are ready to be at war with every other civ in the game, then either don't sign a non-aggression treaty and just finish the game, or wait a few turns for any you did sign to expire before completing your domination.

You have a valid point, however most of my games were finished before turn 100. Therefore 50 turns of treaty is not exactly what I would call "few". Maybe this issue would not have bothered me this much if terms were shorter... But still the main problem is, I don't quite get why do we need such a hard limit? As I said before, this doesn't leave me a choice. Huge penalties for something like that would be more fun and immersive for me. Doesn't it feel wrong for you to sign non-aggression pact and then build starbases all over opponents territory? Trying to culture flip every colony he has without fear of counteraction?

So not automatically push you into war with everyone then. It shouldn't be anything like so absolute. But nothing wrong with making it so they don't trust you as much if you're a known pact-breaker. It'd be nice to see a fairly small 'base' penalty that was then modified by other things:

* Ideological differences between you and the guy you broke the treaty with should reduce the impact - a good guy betraying another good guy would be frowned on far more than a good guy betraying an evil guy.

* Ideological differences between the 3rd party and you. Good empires should dislike bad guys who betray people more than they dislike other good guys betraying people.

* Ideological difference between the 3rd party and the guy you betrayed. Once again, there'll be less bothered that the other guy got betrayed if he's a different ideology.

This should mean that the impact of your treachery is hard to predict across the whole international stage. It makes choosing to attack before the pact ends a gamble; there'll be diplomatic consequences which might prove painful, but might not. It makes it harder to predict specifically how the AI will react, but not hard to predict generally what they'll think about it.

By the way, you can break non-aggression treaties. It just gives you a small -1 diplomacy with that civ.

You can actually break any treaty that does not involve an up-front payment, such as immediate credits, a technology, starbase, planet, ship, etc.

So if you just want a "temporary, breakable non-aggression treaty" just offer it for credits per turn or some durantium resource. Then break it when you want. I have not seen the AI break any such treaty, not sure if that is something the AI knows it can do.

The problem with using real world scenarios is that the game doesn't give you all of the penalties of a "real" diplomatic penalty.

In the real world, diplomatic penalties mean you lose intel, trade, your people get mad, you get phased out of UN resolutions, etc etc.

The game doesn't offer all of these nuances, so something else has to be added in to prevent the player from just willy nilly breaking treaties.

Right now that is a hard cap, and I would say a lot of work has to be added in to remove it.

On a side note, Star Drive 2 has a diplomatic "tolerance" system that is utterly simple and brilliant. It allows for diplomatic foo pahs to lower tolerances with other races. You still have diplomacy, but what you can do is diminished....just like in real life!

Star Drive 2 would be called MOO 4 if that franchise hadn't self destructed. Although SD2 does seem a more worthy successor to MOO 2 than MOO 3 was.

Back on topic...

I agree, however, that treaties should be breakable at a hefty diplomacy hit. Just remember the AI should have that as well. If a race is paying tribute, it should be breakable and start a war. Breaking a non-aggression pact obviously starts a war -- with that race, its allies and maybe just races that don't like you. Every one else should not trust you anymore and trade costs go up considerably.

What happens to normal trade deals with per turn payments?

I agree with you on that. Current diplomatic relationship is indeed lacking in depth, but it still trying to mimic some of those penalties. There are hard coded requirements, like AI will not trade tech or resources with relationship < 2, will not accept alliance offer with < 7, will not give you trade discounts with < 9, and so on.

In my games I always felt like every point of relationship was very important to my ability of manipulating A.I. But, maybe, I was over-thinking it all.