20 turns is too long. And there is no countdown or notice so you have to check them all to see who you can trade with. Solution causes more problems than it solves. 

Don't forget the AI can make demands of you like destroying a starbase near their stuff or claiming nearby relics, but you can't do the same to them. It sure seems like the 3rd talking option in diplomacy is for such things, but I have never, ever been able to click it.

It occurs to me this restriction is largely to prevent 'cheating' for the purposes of the leaderboard. It seems that the solution might be similar to that for the Console usage, which disqualifies you from the leaderboard listing.

It would be possible to have an 'opt in' or 'opt out' on leaderboard listing, thus enabling or disabling certain restrictions.

For me, leaderboard is a non issue (I'm just not that good at this game yet but I love it) so it might make sense to make these restrictive rules optional, so that those of us just playing in the sandbox can do so, and those wishing to show off their skills can do so with the appropriate rules in place.

Agree, being a trade whore should be a totally acceptable Mizarian or Ferengi or any race in Starwars,  method to not have to actually invent tech to use it. I also think the AI should be doing more diplomacy than sharing the same insigth like what is new to me is old to everybody else every 3-5 turns or hittng me up for money. Every single one of them. 

My feeling for the diplo-timer of 20 turns is that it should be scaled based on how big the previous interaction was.  And it should be by "category" instead of an entire "do not talk to us" switch.

Traded me for tech? First off, there should be a limit of no more then 3-5 techs traded at a time, then a 20 turn average cool-down before you can trade tech again with that race.  Races that like you might be willing to trade again as soon as 12 turns, races that don't like you might refuse to talk tech trades for 30 turns.

Asked me to go to war or embargo or sign a treaty? Probably 20-40 turns until we will speak again of treaties based on how much they like you.

Lend-Lease items like ships? The AI should put an upper limit on how many ships it will accept, never accepting more then one fleet's worth based on logistics and/or maint costs?  After which a 10-30 cooldown on ship trades.

Similar for planets and starbases.  If you've traded for a starbase within the last X turns, you can't talk about starbases again for 10-30 turns.

The reason for the trade delay is to guard the AI from some exploitive stuff the player could do (like, declaring war, militarily taking stuff from the AI like resources, then sueing for peace the very next turn for far less than the damage done/bonuses gained, or other stuff like buying colony ships the turn they it a planet etc); although I agree right now it is too long. Actually it should be tight to the mapsize, because, the bigger maps are the longer wars are going to take, as well as on larger maps you usually have more stuff to trade so a longer shutdown of the connection would be justified.

The problem with AIs that are "trade whores" is that this will lead to a scenario in which the AIs get & distribute all techs from the global pool of available techs to each one of them, which can result in frustration for the player who then cannot trade techs anymore to the AI because all of them already have them. There was a time in GC2 where this was the case, a lot of people came complaining in the forums, subsequently the AI got dumbed down. Excessive techtrade is more or less a player-feature.

Another thing is that the AIs diplomacy coding isn't really smart, so keeping it low actually prevents it from doing silly mistakes all over again. (like, giving away warships to a third faction when currently at the brink of loosing a war)

I really like the idea of a trade lock-out per trade item type. Different lengths of lockout per item, just let those things (tech, ships whatever) be grayed-out with a mouse-over tooltip saying how long till you can trade those again.

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quote who="Larsenex" reply="9" id="3558453"]

diplomacy  is far better than other vanilla 4x at launch
[/quote]

I think it is an overstatement. 

I have disabled tech trading in my game, to give myself more of the challenge. So that AI won't to be exploited with unfair tech excexchange.  And I found that I didn't have reason to go the diplomacy screen for entire game. Not that I was specifically avoiding diplomatic options, but there were almost none left to use. Trading resources - I was winning with what I had. Aliances - not sure,  why do I need them especially in their current simplistic format. And that's about all you can do. 

Sure, you can trick one faction to start war with another. Seems to be not very exciting though. It is not helped by the fact that I am winning any war there is. This is on Tough, large maps.

Diplomacy in Civ games (mostly Civ4 and less so Civ5)  feels better since the personality of AI has longer time to present itself and it is happening over bigger span of changing circumstances,  I.e. with each epoch the balance of power shifts and player has to adjust to it. 

CalCiv3 for me at the moment goes by one scenario,  initial development (quite interesting since you have to develop somewhat in the efficient manner), get to medium sized hulls, and start picking up AIs one after another. Which get more and more boring the longer it goes on. AI can't do anything to stop you . Nor alone,  neither teamed up.

So,  it is all kind of Ok, but feels a bit shallow, overall gameplay and diplomacy in particular. 

1) Being able to give gifts should always be allowed. That would solve a lot of issues right there. If you are trying to keep an ally alive, you should be able to feed him ships as needed, as long as they are gifts. Giving a gift should not count towards the diplomacy trading waiting period, or maybe even allow gifts of sufficient value to speed up that waiting period.

2) Please add something on the main diplomacy screen to let me see who is currently willing to engage in trade discussions with me. I hate having to scroll though 20 civs on a large map to see which ones are ready to talk again!

I`ve seen worse... quite a bit worse.

Hi,

In other words, “I feel diplomacy needs additional work in order to give the player a more satisfying game experience. Combined with the concerns I have with the battle viewer and how the AI builds their planets (mentioned in this and other threads), I do not enjoy the current game. However, if these things were addressed I might sing praises” (J5S, 2015).

I know you may not care about my opinion as a fellow gamer and forum poster, but my tactful response to your untactful posts is to please consider that this is SD’s proverbial house, albeit a forum; therefore, please conduct yourself in a civil manner. If any developer wants to experience toxic venom, they can visit other sites but should not expect to tolerate it here. Delivering what may be a valid message of concerns via your written packages of condescension will never be received well. I have been on these forums for five years and although Brad may emotionally respond at times, because he is human and cares about SD and his team, I have never seen him or SD shoot down objective criticism that is provided in a civil manner, supported by solid arguments.

Thank you.

Signed,

Self-Proclaimed Etiquette Reminder-Extraordinaire

Very well put. Apologies if my poor English and probably poor tact were also considered rude. On the way of how the Diplomacy might be improved with the current game mechanics: 

1. Currently resources in the game play secondary role. They are not needed to win the game. They are not even needed to make your empire stronger. What if resurces were the essential components to build the ships and starbases? Then all the sudden you uncover a very important strategic and diplomacy layer. Now you will have to do these resources trading treaties. You will have to visit diplomacy screen often to see who has what you need. And either trade with them or go to war with them, which will be dangerous since they have that critical resource and you don't. 

2. Trade routes. Make freighters to execute specific trade treaties. If you agreed to trade something in eexchange to something else, then you need to say 5 freighters constantly working on the trade routes for resources or cash to be delivered to your empire.  If pirates or other hostiles kill the freighter, then you loose the delivery.make each delivery a persantage of overall deal.

3. Empire bboundaries need to start working.  Currently,  open boarders do not have any meaning. And any faction can fly freely through your space. 

4. The like/ dislike option needs to work better and as was suggested on this forum take in account how far you are on the particular root through ideology. I personally would consider restricting your ideology to one or two options insyead of giving freedom to select all 3. That would make possible to outline AI personalities better.  AI would prefer some ideology combinatons to others. 

5 Consider  adding additional race specific features, I.e. the way they run economy, what  planets they live on , etc. That will make playing them more unique experience and might and should affect diplomacy as well.

To fantasise a bit) - consider having 5-6 ideologies instead of 3. And let player and AI to choose only 2. Each combination of 2 fully covered ideologies will will give that race some superability  Of  course,  diplomacy will take these new combinations in to account as per 4.