It occurs to me that, when in a war situation with another faction, that if I want to bring the conflict to an end in a manner that is not total destruction of one side then I must always pay for it. Be it Altarian, Drengin, Krynn, Iridium, or any number of factions who seem to lose their cool the moment they share borders with a faction that doesn't share their ideology, I have to make a tremendous offering to secure a brief respite, even when fighting factions who continually try to propose peace via the UP instead of addressing me, but when they do finally wish to cease they send only a message saying 'please stop'.

Not to mention that seemingly any faction that goes to war with you once is only MORE likely to start a war with you later on due to the additive negative modifier of 'we were at war', despite whether or not you crushed them into submission. They only seem to 'get it' when your military power far, far outstrips their own. Could 'we surrendered' replace 'we were at war' in that instance as a neutral modifier, rather than negative, to more easily pacify consistent aggression? Would be nice if, when forcing a faction into surrender, a sort of reverse trade window opened where you get to pick out the money/resources/tech you want in order to stop. That might be too good, so how about a mixture of tech/money is randomly chosen from the factions pool and put forth as an offering with the surrender for you to judge whether it's worth stopping. Perhaps this would increase with ever planet you capture, causing higher value offers the closer you come to conquering a home planet?

Surrender aside, how the eff does Diplomacy work? I get that good diplomacy gives you a nice positive modifier, that's usually outweighed by a stack of negatives. I get that lots of Embassies seems to affect your voting power in the United Planet events, but that could have been a side effect of a 150+ colony civilization and 1000+ population.

In fact, the only time I've ever seen an upside of 'diplomacy' was in that same game where I could completely control the UP even if all the other factions voted against me. But in that game, I was Altarian on an Insane Spiral, I had focused Research early on and was several hundred turns of research ahead of even my closest competitor by the time that wars were being fought. When I wanted a faction to stop/start wars, I just threw factions some scraps of Tech until they caved, which is just tech bribery.

I'm going to guess that +Diplomacy only affects the 'value' of establishing certain treaties, but you still have to sweeten the deal with offerings in most cases. You invariably cannot allow trade routes though, because you're inevitably 'trading with an infidel' to someone, and usually several someones. You can't make a few ships without 'your military build up concerns us', and making no ships causes 'you are weak/ripe for conquest' and usually both. How do you get a faction of differing ideologies to like you? I've only ever been able to secure 'peace' by having an insurmountable Tech, Economy and Military lead, but not because anyone actually -liked- me. In fact most of them were 'Furious' but just recognized my ability to utterly destroy them if provoked.

And yes, this is Vanilla Galciv3. Most games are a mix of standard and custom factions.