I have a hard time roleplaying peaceful nations early on since I need to find pretense to make weapons, so I just added a pirate player faction with some rules for them, but the new raider stuff seems neat for that as well.
I think it's not too hard to justify weapons, after all, "if you want peace prepare for war" is a common and arguably correct saying. IMHO, the harder part of playing peacefully is that NPR diplomacy is very limited, even if you find relatively peaceful NPRs there is no way to get them to recognize or negotiate borders, for instance, besides claiming a system and hoping they will accept the claim. Pretty much any more complex treaty is right out, nor can there be some coordination of fleets between allies.
With multiple player races this is all a moot point, of course, but I do dream of a more complex NPR diplomacy system someday...
Yeah I understand all that, it's not so much from the "peaceful among other nations" but more about first contact. Once I find ruins or precursors or such it's bets off, which can some takes a surprisingly long time. But I think it would be a bit strange if we developed warp drive tomorrow and immediately starting strapping lasers to our space probes, given what we currently know about the universe.
