# Diplomacy Gameplay
"We've reworked the way faction relations work. In addition to the relation points, there are now 4 distinct states, that you can slip in and out of, and that majorly define how AI factions interact with you. For example, AI ships will no longer always start attacking on sight when relations are bad; you need to be at war with a faction for that to happen. We also reworked faction traits and how they impact gameplay."

# Neutral
* Initial state for all newly met factions on the map
* Very similar to the previous relations range -40000 to 60000
* Normal interaction with stations and ships of the other faction
** ... except for a few privileges where you must be allied with the faction
* When relations are good enough (~95000, depending on faction traits), you can start negotiating an alliance
* When relations turn too bad, the faction may declare War, but ...
** In order for War to be declared from 'Neutral' you must commit an act of war (destroying, raiding, boarding a ship)
** War won't be declared for minor issues like smuggling

# War
"This is when they just shoot you, no discussion."
* The only state where AI ships always attack on sight
* Normal interaction with ships and stations is not possible
* Can be negotiated to Ceasefire
* No radio chatter

# Ceasefire
"A ceasefire is a fragile pact where players can show their good intentions, and that they actually want to stop the war and improve relations."
* Similar to Neutral
* Some station and ship interaction is possible
* When relations turn good enough (-30000 or above) 'Ceasefire' automatically changes to 'Neutral'
* Committing an act of war by the player (no matter the relations) will terminate the Ceasefire and War will break out again
* During a Ceasefire, when relations reach -100000 (worst possible), War will break out again

# Allies
"Gain access to the best equipment of your ally. Players have less reputation loss, there are reputation loss caps and players call in merchants or reinforcements from your ally."
* 50% less reputation loss with allied factions
* "Soft caps" of losing reputation: No dropping below 90000 or 80000 with a single loss
** Example: When at 96k (96000) relation points, and you "accidentally" destroy your allies' ship, you'd lose about 40k reputation. Instead it's halved to 20k and you won't drop to 76k, but to the 90k cap. After that, you can drop lower again.
* Boarding or raiding an allied ship is always considered an intentional act of war and will terminate the alliance immediately
* No smuggling controls by allied AI ships
* Access to 'Exotic' and better equipment of your ally
* Access to 2 new items:
** Item that lets you call in equipment merchants of your ally, who sell equipment and valuable artifacts
** Item that lets you call in combat reinforcements from your ally


# Gameplay
"Tons and tons of small changes and adjustments: Reworked traits and their impacts, new targeter shapes and colors depending on War, Ceasefire, or standings, and so on."
* Players can pay tribute to a faction to improve relations
* Reworked traits of factions
** Fewer traits with more impact on gameplay
** Traits now influence the amount of repuation gained or lost, depending on what happened
* Reduced relation point descriptions from 8 to 5 (Hostile, Bad, Neutral, Good, Excellent)
* Reworked color scheme of relation statuses
* Added new target indicators for 'War', 'Ceasefire' and 'Allies'
* Implemented means to negotiate with AI factions
** Players can now make money/resource offers in a specific range
** Counterpart has a patience level that drops the more often a player makes an offer they don't like
** Tribute, Ceasefire or Alliance is accepted when the offer is good enough
** Once patience runs out, the player has to wait for some time until he can negotiate again
* Relations can't be improved/worsended beyond a certain point with some kinds of interaction
** A few examples:
** Equipment trade won't improve relations beyond 75000
** Using services of a faction (refinery, shipyard) won't improve relations beyond 45000
** Smuggling won't worsen relations below -75000
** Doing missions or helping via events (pirate attacks) will always improve relations
** Destroying ships, raiding etc. will always worsen relations
* Once relations drop below -80000, reconstruction sites are terminated
* When a player is set to his home sector and his starting allies are at war with him, relations with them are set to "Ceasefire" and some money is taken from the player
* Added mean radio chatter when in the territory of a faction that doesn't like you


# Balancing
"Adjusted railgun damage, which was a little excessive sometimes, especially considering that railguns aren't projectiles but hitscan. Still does more damage the more blocks you hit, but in a more balanced manner."
* Railgun base damage is now spread evenly over the first 4 hit blocks, then has a falloff of 20% per additionally hit block
* More allies per faction will be spawned for wormhole guardian fight
* Increased spawn region of AI and Swoks


# Galaxy
"In order for the diplomacy changes to matter, we reduced the number of different factions. The galaxy map no longer looks like patchwork. This will not break existing saves! No new factions are introduced, and the changes will only affect newly generated sectors."
* Reduced the amount of factions on the map
* Factions now have much bigger territories
* Increased reach of gates to better connect to far away sectors and avoid cut-off "islands" of factions
* A player's relation to newly met AI factions can't be worse than -20k if he's no more than 150 sectors away from his home sector
** Depends on difficulty, -20k for 'Normal' and easier, disabled at 'Difficult' and harder
** Dev Comment: "We saw that, with bigger faction territories, there comes a high probability to start next to a faction that immediately hates the player and that has an extremely large territory they may have to traverse. Since that can prove very frustrating (esp. for new players), we've eliminated this possibility."


# Diplomacy UI
"The diplomacy tabs for player and alliance got a complete overhaul! Aside from now being implemented in lua (modders rejoice!), they received a visual rework and will give you a lot more important information about your fellow space-dwelling factions. You can now see details about their traits and what they do, in addition to negotiation possibilities."
* Complete rework of the diplomacy UI
* Added sorting of factions by distance to the player's current location (ie. nearby factions are at the top of the list)
* Added buttons for negotiating Ceasefire or Alliance, or for paying tribute to improve relations
* Added detailed description of a faction's traits and how they affect gameplay


# Client
"So this one is both hilarious and embarrassing: Since the Kickstarter Demo there was a bug in the background generation of the game, which, for some reason, was never discovered. We've fixed it and backgrounds finally look the way there were supposed to, with way more tiny stars! Apart from that we added some long-awaited smaller improvements to the building mode."
* Massively improved space background quality
** More background stars
** While at it we also improved the quality for lower-res backgrounds (no more super ugly backgrounds at lower quality)
* Improved tooltips
* Added new radio chatter lines
* Added more obvious radio chatter hints for players on how to meet Swoks and the AI
* Reworked cargo transport license tooltip
* Ship size is now shown in Building Mode
* Block size of current block is now shown in Build Mode
* Main menu: Renamed "Quit" to "Exit Game"


# Misc
* Improved behavior of ships flying too far away for players to hit them and staying at that distance
* Several performance improvements for calculation of gate connections
* Improved start sector creation, players are now guaranteed to be inside territory of another faction
* Shots & torpedoes fired by player-owned, AI-controlled ships are now marked as such, plus intended target faction
** Those shots now vanish when they hit an AI faction that the shot wasn't meant for, to avoid unwanted relation changes
** In short: In order for your AI-controlled turrets, fighters or ships to damage ships / worsen standings with another faction, they must attack them on purpose, not hit them by accident
* Player notification about gate usage now shows name of ship
* "No money to pay crew" message now contains ship name
* Turrets can now be placed over multiple blocks as long as they touch them


# Scripting API
"Most important changes are: You can now add windows to the Hud and Alliance Tab, and you get full access to the player's known galaxy map."
* Added a SectorView class
* Exposed functionality to access known sectors of Player and Alliance on the map
* Added a Relation class
* Added more relations-related functionality to Player, Alliance and Faction
* Relation loss for destroying other ships moved to lua from core engine
* Added a getPresentFactions() function to Sector
* Added AllianceTab as a scriptable UI
* Added Hud as a scriptable UI
* Extended Tooltip class
* Implemented separate tooltip creation for Vanilla- and UsableInventoryItem
* Implemented a replace function for faction names in tooltips
** A construct like ${faction:54} will be replaced by the (localized) name of faction with index 54
* Added a 'homeSectorUnknown' property for factions that don't really have a home sector (Xsotan, pirates, etc)
* Added a SectorChangeType enum, which is passed as a parameter on the server when a player changes sectors
* Mails are now localized
* Added more functionality to various UI elements
* Added a 'alwaysAtWar' property for AI factions
* Renamed "isAI" property of Owner to "isAIFaction" for better consistency with the faction property
* Fixed main.lua scripts not having access to everything they need in their initialize() function
* Moved data/scripts/player/encyclopedia to data/scripts/player/ui/encyclopedia


# Bugfixes
"What's an update without bugfixes? We've fixed quite a few bugs again. Thanks for reporting and keep it up, guys! UBR = User Bug Report."
* [UBR] Fixed several instances of story-encounters where relations would be permanently worsened even though they shouldn't be
* Fixed an issue where abandoning a mission sometimes didn't really terminate it
* Fixed several issues where interactions could happen with stations even though they shouldn't, relation-wise
* [UBR] Fixed a crash when downgrading torpedo shafts
* Fixed an issue where server time counter didn't work due to floating point inaccuracy
* [UBR] Fixed some broken translations in shop UI
* [UBR] Fixed some factories giving the player money for upgrading
* [UBR] Fixed cloning and academy not working while no players are in the sector
* [UBR] Fixed an issue with ai ships adding jobs at a refinery
* Forgetful AI: Fixed an issue where special friends or enemies of AI ships wouldn't be remembered over game shutdowns
* [UBR] Fixed an issue where the orderchain didn't terminate mining/salvaging correctly and got stuck on that order
* [UBR] Fixed several crashes caused by community translations