I was just playing BOTF and was thinking abuot what I really wanted in BOTF2.

I realized the Diplomacy section needs a overhaul. While playing I was thinking the following would be amazing for a Diplomacy, Trading & Espionage / Sabotage sections:

- The Ability to trade with races technology advances and technology authorization use (ie. Cloaking). What if you were itching to explore Dominion Space without being detected, but your The Federation and you dont have such technology. Then contact The Romulans... offer them The latest phaser tech for the ability to cloak your ships.

- The Ability to restrict other races from colonizing or setting up space stations in specific sectors. What I would like to have is to be able to demand The Dominion from colonizing and settling in the following sectors (23. 34, 34.54, etc).

- The Ability to fund partisans on Member planets / subjugated planets of The Dominion

- The Ability to direct my spies to destroy a Dominion Shield Generator and Bunker complex on the Ktarian System. So when my fleets go in there will be limited resistance.

Stuff like that what do you think?

Diplomacy needs an overhaul because it is not yet finished. We've got plans on ways to improve diplomacy and Mike is working on the system, but he's also working on a million-and-one other game-related things so it's just going to take time.

That said:

Tech trading is almost definitely not going to be in. It would require radical changes to the tech system and whilst we are planning some as-yet unannounced changes, they aren't related to tech trading. Whether a ship class has a cloaking device will be purely about canon - if it had it onscreen, it'll have it ingame. Note: the Defiant class won't have one because only the USS Defiant had one, and that was through a treaty with the Romulans. The class itself was not built with one as standard. Also note that the Federation scout has a cloaking device ingame purely for testing purposes and the cloak will be removed as part of a future update once we know the cloaking code is working.

We've discussed the idea of neutral/demilitarised zones on the forums in the past. I'm not sure if Mike plans to implement them or not, but I think it's a definite possibility. If he does include them, then we could potentially add no-colonisation as one of the default restrictions, or even make it a selectable point to diplomatically wrangle over with the AI. A neutral/demilitarised zone would prevent the constructing of ships as these are military assets. We'll have to discuss if this includes science stations though.

Funding partisans means funding revolutions. This will be part of intel activities IF it is part of the game, but I don't think it will. And IF it is in, it would be possible against ALL empires, not just the Dominion. We've got plans to overhaul the intel screen with an unannounced replacement and new features, so expect changes of some kind in future.

Directing spies...not really sure there. This won't be in as a standard part of the game, but it sort-of will as well. I'll refer you to my last comment above for the time being.