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Hey everyone,
The update is a few days away, so now is a good time to start showing you some of the more salient points of Galactic Statecraft, our new free update! Today, we're starting with the diplomacy-oriented stuff...
Coordination tool
We are adding a new way of communicating with your allies, be they AI or real players, in the form of a coordination tool you can use directly on the map. Have a system you really need help defending? Is there somewhere your allies should gather forces before overwhelming the enemy? You can now drop a ping anywhere on the galaxy view to get your allies' attention, along with a message.
There are two pings you can drop, offensive and defensive (only one of each at a time), along with a short message for your allies. Of course, only you and your allies can see this message (and you can even toggle their visibility if you so wish!). The AI (and hopefully your human allies) will take these into account and send fleets to your markers if they can spare the resources.
Once in an alliance, you will also notice a convenient new "Alliance" tab in the chat, which you can use to devise winning strategies, or plot against your common enemies!
Alliance renouncement
And if that's not working out... you could always wash your hands of it and walk away. If an alliance member declares war on a third party for a reason you do not support, you can simply elect to drop out of the alliance! Of course, it is not possible to drop out of an alliance when being declared war on, as all individual members would retain war status even after dropping out. This means that you cannot force your whole alliance to enter war, otherwise your allies might bail and leave you with more than you can chew. Make sure you and your allies are on the same page!
Cooperative protocols
What better to cement a long-lasting alliance than a long-term, fruitful project that is mutually beneficial? If you have enough Influence to get involved in them, cooperative protocols are treaties that you can sign with other alliance members (one at a time) that will grant faction-specific, empire-wide bonuses (depending on the faction) that will increase over time until they reach a cap. To balance it out, this agreement has an ongoing Influence upkeep that is significant, and if you can't support the cost, the treaty is cancelled.
Diplomatic requests
Currently, the AI detects a specific ingame situation and reacts to it by sending you an appropriate mood message (eg "You are trespassing--be gone or be sorry"). This aims to take things one step further and make this into a formal diplomatic request, giving you an option to react, and to allow human players to use the feature!
Basically, if the game detects that a contextual situation (eg trespassing) is happening within your territory, it unlocks the "Stop trespassing" term in a new tab in the Diplomatic menu.
You can then send this at no cost to the offending player, who picks a response. If they refuse, you can react, for instance denouncing them to other empires, or hiding the truth from your own population!
This is a new means for players to resolve potentially conflictual situations, to entice empires to turn to diplomacy instead of gunning straight for the... guns, and to give non-military focused players other options to play the game their way.
That's it for the diplomatic aspect of changes! Tomorrow, we'll show some more of the changes coming to Endless Space 2 with the Galactic Statecraft update. We hope you're excited!
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