Peace by deafult

Peace is now a default state, meaning diplomacy has been implemented. In other games in the genre, even if it is called peace, by default you are neither at peace nor at war with your neighbors. In Master of Orion for instance parties have to form a non-aggression pact in order to stop each other from engaging in combat. Without it you are free too attack each other and still enjoy trade treaties if neither side explicitly declares a war. Sure, an AI will automatically declare war every single time you attack it's ships (even if you let them retreat without casualties) but when AI attacks you it's "only" a friendly rub and you end up being rude for feeling offended.

Peace in the Stareater on the other hand assumes non-aggression pact. Picking on targets of opportunity (weak fleets, unprotected colonies) is strictly forbidden before formally declaring a war. Natives on the other hand don't respect human customs so they are always treated as enemies.

What is implemented at the moment is public relations screen where you can see your contacts with other players and see which treaties you have with them. From there you can call for an audience which will be held after hitting next turn. During the audience you can declare war or offer peace. For now this is it and AI will go along with whatever you ask of it. It will take some fleshing out but the idea for the future is to have "public opinion" feature where each civilization population holds an opinion about other civilizations. If opinion is too low then war can be declared and trade treaties will be harder to form. If opinion is very high then cease fire must be declared and war between those civilizations can't be declared again.

It was a bit boring to implement this feature, mostly due to sizable amount of GUI involved. It doesn't look much but there is quite a number of things inside the things. At the end it became interesting and I even did an extra mile to finish an old task of including undefended colonies to space combat check. There are not many tasks left in the backlog for v0.6, this milestone is going to conclude faster then I've anticipated.