Initial diplomacy

It's tempting to concentrate on exploring your own little connected area, and ignore the outside world until you have nowhere else to expand, but it is probably a mistake to do so.

There are two reasons for this:

1. Any bilateral trade (assuming it is beneficial to both parties) is a gain relative to the other 9 players, so getting (beneficial) trades set up is an advantage over players who do not.
2. Eventually you will have to expand outside of your own little area if you want to do more than merely survive.  When you do so, dispute is inevitable and war will break out. Since you don't want to find yourself fighting wars on multiple fronts, it is advantageous to secure agreements and good working relationships on at least some of your borders.

Consequently here are some tips that seem to be working for me so far (or which I wish I had realized sooner in some cases!):

• Send ambassadors to everyone on turn 1.  It doesn't cost you anything, and it puts in place faster communication paths that you can use to develop relationships when appropriate.  I'd go so far as to say that I would tend to read something mildly negative into NOT receiving an ambassador - a weak indication that someone may to be easy to deal with, and therefore perhaps not a good partner later.
• Try to identify your nearest neighbors as early as you can.  Partly that means just keeping your eyes open for ships that finish turns in deep space and are thus visible on the starmap (which probably won't happen early on if the players are at all experienced), and partly it means using sensor sweep missions to look for industrial activity.  Also intersperse some mine sweeping with sensor sweeping to be sure to pick up any developing minefields in range (I oops'd on this in a recent game, only performing sensor sweeps, and marched cloaked straight into some webmines). Of course, your opponents are probably being stealthy at first (my next post is going to be on this subject), but it does no harm to look.  As an aid to maximizing the reach of your sensors, I think it might be good policy to expand to the furthest reaches of your connected star cluster preferentially over some sort of spiraling expansion from your homeworld.  However, this has some consequences for logistics (your early ships won't be able to come back so quickly, so you have to be sure you can still feed your homeworld before it runs short of resources).
• Having identified your neighbors, consider as a high priority which you want to try to deal with an an ally, and which as a (potential at least) enemy.  Once you make this decision bind the friend with trade deals as quickly as you can, and secure the relationship.  These should be mutually beneficial, straight deals - don't try to eke out minor advantage here - you're looking for a partner, not a stooge.  When considering which neighbor to try to befriend I look at:
  • Have they sent an ambassador?
  • Are they a race I can work well with (or really not fight very easily)?  In particular does their ship list contain something I want (and do I have something they want)?
  • Do I have valuable assets on their side of my space that I would prefer to be in a less risky strategic environment (e.g. - large population bovinoids and so on)?
  • From what I can see of the distribution of natives, do they have multiple of a key type I am missing and visa versa? (e.g. - if I lack a humanoid planet, but have 2 Ghlipsoidal and they have the opposite imbalance then there are obvious trades to be had)
• Especially with neighbors you have not come to an arrangement with, try to gather intelligence, and stake territorial claims that prevent them pushing the border too far your way - at least try to keep them out of the connected set of planets containing your homeworld (assuming you're not on a map, that puts you both into the same connected region).  If you can move into their space undetected I'd do it, at least until contact is made, after which you may want to respect their borders, depending on the nature of the diplomacy that ensues.  This may mean moving between your cluster and theirs cloaked (if you are able to do so, and you don't think they are taking counter-measures yet), or it may mean directly moving to worlds in their connected cluster you believe (hope) they have not yet colonized if you have access to gravitonic accelerators.
• Don't move to a full ally status any time soon.  It's a public declaration, and doesn't buy you that much beyond sticking a target on your backs!

Key to all of this is finding a trade you want to make, so what sort of trades might you look for and propose?  Personally I like to look for key capabilities I am missing, of which the following are top contenders:

• Can one party construct fighters efficiently (Robots, Colonies, Rebels) and the other has need of them (has carriers significant to their fleet, such as the Borg)?  If so then the first player can offer to produce fighters for something in return.
• Does one party have ships with important special abilities the other lacks?  The top ones for me are:
  • Cloaking.  Cloakers are very valuable for a race that cannot build their own.
  • Gravitonic accelerators.  Being able to move twice as far is very, very valuable, even if you only use it as glorified tugs (which means some other ships can be built with very low tech engines often).  Obviously MCBRs, which can also cloak are especially valuable.
  • Glory devices.  If you are trading for these bear in mind that they are use-once, so you need them in numbers.  They are super-cheap to build (even to clone) though (at least in sensible configurations), so generally this just means you need to get one early.
  • Fuel production.  Cobols and Ariels are worth their weight in gold.
  • Chunneling.  Only fireclouds can chunnel, and sometimes that can be a hugely important ability.  Initially I rated this as the top ability from just reading through the rules and a little private game play, but I now rate it below any of the above.  The reason for this is that fireclouds are really only usefully deployed in numbers (at least 3 are required to make a reusable route), so to be useful trades, you need to either get them early enough to clone a fair bit, or get several.
  One other thing to say about ship exchanges - assuming the receiving party is able to clone (so not privateers or crystals), the ships are far more valuable early on than they are later, since cloning will only be possible before the ship limit is reached.  You should also explicitly request (and propose in the interests of straight-dealing!) a configuration that maximizes the use of the special ability while minimizing cloning costs (since cloned ships cost double).  This tends to mean you really want ships with low level beams and torpedos rather than higher level ones (though in most cases [all but poppers?] you do want high tech engines)!  It's actually rather annoying to be given a firecloud with Mk VII torps, and heavy phasers, when you plan to just use them as taxis, and would prefer to be able to duplicate them cheaply!  In the case of cloakers especially, you probably want to go for x-ray lasers so you can more easily use them to capture rather than kill.
• If the ship lists are mutually reinforcing, then rather than just trading ships, consider trading starbases.  For example have the privateer run a Ghlipsoidal SB for you (to produce MCBRs), in return for running maybe a humanoid one (to produce some sort of heavy fighting ship) for them.  This offers a couple of advantages:
• No cloning is involved, so costs are not doubled
• Production can continue after the ship limit is reached, either by luck (regular builds) or by mutually agreed priority building

Having decided who to befriend (and presumably having received indications of mutual interest), bind them in, to make it hard for them to later go back on the arrangement and stab you in the back (and make it hard for you to do likewise of course - this is reciprocal).  A good starter for this to agree to move to an intelligence sharing diplomatic status with them immediately.  This is a great trust-builder since you can see each other's troop build-ups, and that force disposition is not moving to threaten your supposed ally.  Starbase exchanges, as described above, are also good binding measures, since you control a proportion of each other's production, which makes deal-breaking more expensive (for you both).

Finally, and this may be more a personal philosophy than necessarily a definite best way to play, don't go back on deals you have agreed to.  Ever.  Remember that you're not just playing an isolated game (at least hopefully), but rather a meta-game in the larger Planets.nu gamespace (or even space of all multi-player games, or even of life if you care to take the logic to its extreme!) - in the larger sphere getting a reputation as someone who does not keep their deals will not be strategically advantageous!  The corollary of this is that you shouldn't make deals lightly.  In the first few games I played (which I'm still playing, in fact) I came to peaceful arrangements with both my neighbours - this makes for a quiet life, but it also makes it very hard to expand after the initial phase of the game, and I'd say it's usually a bad idea for that reason.  The lesson is not to put yourself in situations where you will probably want to renege on a deal, or stab a supposed ally in the back (I haven't incidentally, but it means I don't have much potential to do more than survive in those games).