After laboring through a couple games of Master of Orion 4, which I'd recently acquired, I have this to say about 4x game diplomacy: There's been no progress in over 20 years. Not... a trickle, not a crawl, but... nothing. I'm actually forced to give preference to the old-old skool weenie leaders of yore. Uh, yeah I see the menus have 2x or 3x more depth to them, but only I, the player, even have the option to use them all; and half of them have no effect.

To illustrate, going back again to a match of that other venerable 4x franchise, the Human race blew up some of my spacefarers, glowered and fumed when I declared war, which I had the option not to do - that's right, it's expected by ai races to attack and then NOT be necessarily in a state of war - then they ignored me for 100 turns. That's right, they shut down diplomatic channels, even being broke as my spies discovered.  Obviously they weren't trading with anyone else for cash, they just bunkered.  By that time I was embroiled in hostilities with two other races.  I had basically lost the war on my main front, despite being successful in science and industry.  My one salvage was that I had an older fleet poised to humiliate the strongest of my opponents.  When they were en route to doing just that, the humans swung in - with very obviously their entire mass of war materiel - and because of the way that movement is accomplished in the MOO4 universe, I had no means of escaping their clutches despite having better drive technology, and just being cooler in general, by Urkel!  Maybe 983 out of 1000 human adversaries if placed in that situation, would have tried to extort me in some way, but these jabronies mutely, dumbly decimated the apple of my eye fleet with bird families & little bird babies on board and all.  I guess they had some business lurking there with obviously every space-taxi and garbage scow their empire ever produced formed alongside their flagship(s) but do you know something, I hated it anyway.  And I know - I don't have proof, mind you, but I bloody well know - that my friends elsewhere in the galaxy would all go "meh" if I went after this to cry on their shoulders.  Least immersion possible right here.

So in summation, if anyone was worried GalCiv 3 was somehow lagging in diplomatic interaction... don't be.  The cutting edge is like a wet bagel right now.  A Game of Thrones we have not.