Now that Diplomacy has been released, I feel it's an appropriate time to voice what has been a very prominent concern for me. I realize that game balancing is an ongoing project, and that there will most likely be a lot of feedback along the way, but I would like to bring this out into the open if possible. I always felt that diplomacy was greatly overpowered in Galactic Civilizations 2. I never played through the campaign, and I didn't start playing until TOA, so please take this review in that context. All of my experience is with custom matches in large/huge galaxies with many AI opponents to trade with. Here are a few points I would like to bring to attention.
1. I feel like the fact that diplomacy was overpowered in GalCiv2 was overlooked because nearly EVERYONE played as Terran. Their diplomatic power made a lot of sense during the campaign, where you have one or two enemies hard-coded at war with you, and one which you have to work with to survive. It gave you the ability to control what technology your allies had, and enough skill to keep your enemies at bay, and even trade with them when needed. However, when you brought that level of power into a custom match, where everyone starts out neutral, you were simply able to pull the wool over everyone's eyes and rob them blind. Which leads me to my next point...
2. The "Super Diplomat" special ability was 5x as useful as any other player ability IMO. I simply cannot imagine any reason to select another ability when creating a new race, regardless of what type of player you are planning to be, especially a war lord. Lets see, would I rather have the first shot in battle, or the ability to start off with diplomatic superiority over 80% of all the other races? A bonus to attack and defense is meaningless if you can pick Super Diplomat and trade for every other races special abilities (oh, thanks Aceans for your +20% defense, advanced manufacturing, and 1000bc for "impluse drive"). A bit of an exaggeration but I think you get the point.
3. There was no incentive to focus on a small percentage gain in trade, weapons, defense, research, or even specialized planet colonization (which was simply too infrequent to be useful anyway), when you can gain all of these things and more through diplomacy, and make a killing at it.
I realize that the focus on multiplayer will eventually bring any unfair advantages like this to the table, but since this really bothered me about Galactic Civilizations 2, and Diplomacy was just recently introduced, I felt it was a good time to rant. IMO, if you played as Terrans in custom games, you had it way too easy. I found myself struggling with "crippling" difficulty while playing as the Yor, which is why I enjoyed them so much. If I played as Terran, the difficulty setting didn't matter, it just meant better technologies and more money when trading.
