Is it possible to make a peaceful first contact with an alien species? Every time i find an alien race, it ends with a salvo of missiles hitting my survey vessel. The closest I've come is having my survey ship blasted away, then my second ship not being fired upon. I left it in system to establish communications, and an alien fleet marked neutral sat near my ship. It stayed that way for about a month, then they blasted my ship again. So can I make contact with a race without my ships being blown away?
Go read the "Diplomatic Rules" link on the "Useful Posts" thread in the Tutorials board
viewtopic.php?f=101&t=1963Four things that are relevant to your situation:
1) Some aliens will be hostile on sight - there's not a lot you can do about them.
2) If you've got a ship in a system where they have a population, and they're picking you up on active sensors they're going to become more and more hostile towards you.
3) You don't need to stay in the same system to attempt communications/diplomacy. Once you've picked them up on an active sensor (or any sensor in 5.0, I believe), then they should show up in the Diplomacy screen and you should be able to do diplomacy stuff with them (like attempt to open communications and assign a diplomatic team).
4) The most important thing you can do to make them like you (other than actively p***ing them off
) is to assign a high-bonus dimplomatic team to them. This will slowly bias them towards liking you. For early game, you should be able to scrape together 5 commanders with bonuses of ~20 or more - you should use the best 5 in your fleet. Note that you can train diplomats up before you meet aliens by assigning them as Public Affairs Officers on task force staffs - I tend to make sure my top diplomats (that aren't in teams) are filling all such slots.
John
