Should the Drengin get a diplomatic penality instead of discontent?

It does make sense that the Drengin would be at a disadvantage diplomatically. I think ideology should apply diplomatic bonuses or penalties depending on the ideology of the race that is being negotiated with. Is that already in? I don't know, but it makes sense.

I strongly disagree.

Yor get:

• Unlikable: -2 diplomacy
• Observant:  +1 sensor range
• Organized: +10 logistics
• Productive: +25% manufacturing (planetary mfg)
• Resiliant : +25% (modifies how quickly ships are repaired after battle)
• Sentient Machines ( Synthetic life +1 (as opposed to null=organic?), synthetic population cap +16

Drengin get:

• Brutal: +25% soldering
• Discontent: -20% goods & services (morale afaik)
• Courageous: +15% Planetary defense
• Militant: +20% military manufacturing
• Tough: +20% ship HP

The drengin can build stronger ships fast, invade hard, defend invasion well, Unimplemented morale/goods & services  is the thing that will Jeep drengin from too easily snowball unstoppably simply because planets will get unhappy & be too expensive to rush suitable entertainment & such

The Yor however... They build planets faster than most, have a unique population growth & cap mechanic that wildly changes how they play.. However, their individual ships & planetary assault/defense are just average.  They get no bonus to speed, research, ship range, etc either.  All combined, this makes yor into a very neutral & not particularly aggressive race innately, they are just horrible at empathizing with mortal, unspecialized, unadaptable biological creatures that cannot do things such as modify their bodies to their individual tasks.  Combine this with the synthetic population mechanics & they effectively turn into a race with the tourism tech to enable tourism the  most effective early goal with the diplomacy penalty putting them at near KoS to  races with a diplomacy bonus  Yor only need a military or trade routes to keep from being attacked.  With proper tightrope walking, the tourism income yor gets makes them more of a turtle influence race that starts slow & has a tightrope that frays to a strand of spidersilk if you start encountering too many of the wrong species before they can pull off enough income  to support it

Not having played drengin too much, it seems like they could pop out & stab aggressively, then offer peace in exchange for $stuff... maybe even some of the captured worlds starting to fail if peace isn't enough to get what they want.  A diplomacy penalty would be ineffective since getting attacked by a weaker party is self negating when their military strength drops below yours enough & - skill in diplomacy becomes ++Much stronger military, their tightrope is just to keep their pop happy enough to let them continue funding military maintenance costs (remember that in GC2, tax rates & morale were tied).

That's all well and good from a gameplay point of view, but from a lore perspective it doesn't make sense for any non-evil civ to trust the Drengin. It doesn't even make sense for evil races to trust the Drengin, but the risks are probably less.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany%E2%80%93Israel_relations

I feel that No further words are needed, but rather than risk goodwinning things I could write for pages about angel/viking relationsa that blossomed into the grouping of allies that is western europe today or us/england relations.  

on the  ~"doesn't  make sense for races to trust the drengin" topic

But since you bring up a few series of doors.... More to come after the timeline below:

• • 2178: The Great Space Race: The six major species rush to establish interstellar colonies.
  • 2190: 
    • The Altarian Prophecy surfaces, a 100,000-year-old document that predicted that Altarians would meet their “cousins” and then learn of their origins.
    • The Status Quo Treaty, which allows the “United Planets” to act as an arbitrator on disputed colonization, signed by the six major races.
  • 2225: 
    • The Dread Lord war embroils the galaxy.
    • The Dread Lords are defeated but Coalition forces (Terrans, Altarians, Torians, and Arceans) are gravely weakened.
  • 2226: 
    • The Drengin and Yor launch a surprise invasion of the Coalition and quickly defeat them.
    • The First Fleet of the Terran Alliance escapes to the pocket universe that the Dread Lords had escaped.
    • Arcea is occupied.
    • Toria is occupied.
    • The Drath homeworld is destroyed by the Drengin.
  • 2227: 
    • The Korath, the shock troops of the Drengin Empire, exterminate the majority of the galactic Korx population.
    • Civil war erupts between the Drengin and the Korath (told in Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar).
    • The Yor wipe out Altarian, Arcean, and Torian colonies across the galaxy.
  • 2230: 
    • The Terran Second Fleet is joined by the Odyssey Deep Space Task Force.
    • The Second Fleet [Terrans] is also able to join forces with the last Arnor, who aids in the construction of a powerful weapon. The Terror Star, mostly based on Precursor technology, is able to warp space and thus destabilize the integrity of a star, which in turn wipes out the star system.
    • The Terror Star is used to destroy the last Dread Lord stronghold, which robs the Korath of their secret support structure.
    • The Thalan destroy the Terror Star and the plans to create additional ones.
  • 2233: 
    • The Second Fleet fights a losing rear-guard action in an attempt to save as many human colonies as possible. The Yor meticulously wipe out Terran colonies.
  • 2235: 
    • The Second Fleet splinters into two: Patriots and Mutineers. The Patriots claim to represent the Terran Alliance. The Mutineers, hateful toward aliens and the Thalan in particular, begin to terrorize any aliens who might be considered a threat.
  • 2242: 
    • The Terran First Fleet returns from the pocket universe, armed with terrible weapons that demolish the Drengin fleet surprised by its arrival.

With that said.  A lot happens during the first 52 years there (who knows how much damage the drengin/korx offshoot did), and the the terrans wildly surpass the superweapon described in their famous works of fiction a hundred and some years prior by blowing up a freaking star!  In GalCivII, things were more simplified due to the folks at stardock being able to build off earlier code now, thus allowing the differentiated tech trees & tech briefings among other things.

As a result of that new tech/code The Yor are nonbiological & they refer to different areas of their own society in ways not dissimilar to the potentially very hostile wording they use towards biological races simply by acknowledging facts in their communications when relevance is felt, but years prior they decided things had gone too far when terrans blew up a freaking star and started purging galactic terrorist strongholds until the terrorist problem, begins solving itself.  Rather than  attempt to ascribe black & white morality outright  Blue & Orange morality we now have the tech tree flavor/briefing text to explain the bacon/necktie axis(see link) previously attributed to good & evil because some races were simply closer to the human neutral point on the various incarnations of the bacon/necktie axis.

In GalCiv III, the yor are wildly off center on that axis, but have strengths that grant a massive stronghold in a tourism fueled influence victory (some of the treaty options appear likely to stab tourism income in reply to war).  The iridium are close to neutral on it, and are able to use diplomacy/trade towards either influence or war.

There are far, far more examples of failed diplomacy due to a lack of trust than the reverse. Trust is the bedrock of diplomacy regardless of edge cases to the contrary. Would you trust the Drengin? Of course not, and neither would I. Nevertheless, from a gameplay point of view they may be sufficiently penalized already, but the fiction suggests otherwise.

After they looked into the korrath abyss, recoiled in horror, & started to address that abyss's energy sources within their own culture?  With the number of races who get a diplomacy bonus (Humans, altarians & Iridium via research plus10-20% right now alone...)n having a mere +0 is effectively a penalty given how those research & +diplomacy bunuses compound with the other bonuses given to those races.

Trust is only one potentialdiplomatic keystone, big pointy sticks & hats made of money are two other ones with the capability to override certain levels of mistrust with ease..

That's very true. Fear and self-interest are big factors. No one is suggesting that the Drengin (or anyone else) be barred from making deals, only that they suffer a diplomatic penalty (which I think should be modified or replaced by ethics). Deals are made all the time in-game and in the real world between parties that detest one another; but they're not the same deals that would be made if there were more trust between the negotiating factions. I personally think a global ethics-based approach should be taken that provides penalties or bonuses depending on the parties at the table; this would solve the fictional history problem and allow diplomacy to be more fluid, which a good 4x should be.

Yes. And I am always right on Christmas.

;- )

Well, in multiplayer games, diplomacy modifiers really don't make a difference, but discontent makes a huge difference to the techs you research. So... for me, mulitplayer is all i care about, so i would be better off as a mainly Drengin player if discontent was removed and i no longer had to research and build fighting pits.

That's one way to do it but i'd prefer to keep them unique. The drengin AI should just get a constant desire to go to war with races on their borders, so everyone else should get a penalty to the drengin OR their AI just has a setting called breathing room. They should be always ready for war, especially against anyone weaker than they are or on their borders. An easy way to do this is triple or double the border relations modifier for drengin.

If they were setup like this I'd be happy for them to keep their bonuses, because they'd need them!

Unless stardock is planning another big bad race outside of those we've seen, like the crusading race from the campaign, then the drengin need to feel like the threat they are.

Also discontent should go away when they are at war.

-edit

I want to add to this that i'm glad we got an evil morality race that wasn't just about invading in the Yor, it makes them and the drengin different. An evil race going for an influence victory or research victory is great They were the first types of races I was going to mod in, merciless research victory isolationists for example with a bonus to research but a penalty to trade/expansion.