I have a NPR that keeps sending a "suggest leave" to my 10,000 ton diplomatic ship. Does this mean that it is causing relations to go down, or is it being caused by the survey ship that is in the system but not being tracked (I think).
Should I have my diplomatic ship leave the system?
The diplomatic ship has ELINT modules and military engines as well, if that matters
It depends. The suggestion to leave is accompanied by a decrease in their opinion of you. At the same time, your diplo ship is causing their opinion of you to rise. Both happen once per construction cycle, so all that matters is their relative strength.
The amount that their opinion decreases due to unwanted ships in their systems is based on the total tonnage of those ships multiplied by your threat level.
They will completely ignore a single ship per system as long as it has a diplomacy module, has commercial engines, is not known by them to have any weapons, and is less than 10,000 tons. Your diplomacy ship doesn’t qualify, so it isn’t being ignored. If the total tonnage of ships comes out to less than 1,000 tons, they just round up to 1,000 tons.
Your threat level depends on where you are in their space, their diplomatic status towards you, and their xenophobia level. There is a factor of 10 difference between your threat when you are in their capital vs when you are just in a fringe system (unless they have only a single system, which is pretty rare). Your threat level is halved if they are already friendly towards you, and doubled if they are neutral towards you but their opinion of you is negative for any reason.
They also add in the EM rating of any detected colonies in their claimed systems, but you didn’t mention any of those so I assume that there are none.
Assuming that they only detect your single 10,000 ton diplomacy ship, that you are in a secondary system, and that their opinion of you has not yet dropped below zero, it is probable that you are losing ~125 diplomacy points per year. It could be more if they are more xenophobic than average, or less if they are less xenophobic than average. If you had a real diplomatic ship you would only be losing ~40 points per year.
The formula for calculating how many diplomacy points you can gain per year is simple but does have one major input that you probably do not know:
Diplomacy Points = ((Diplomacy Bonus * 4) + 1) * 100 * (1 – (Target Racial Xenophobia / 100))
Thus, an officer with 20% Diplomacy trying to influence an alien race with Xenophobia of 50 would have the following calculation: ((0.2 * 4) + 1) * 100 * (0.5) = 90 Points.
If you are losing 125 points per year and only gaining 90, then you should probably leave. Of course, they might have low xenophobia, in which case you are both losing less and gaining more and could perhaps stay. I wouldn’t count on it though. You should expect that their opinion of you has already gone negative, and so you should probably stay away for a while so that it will have decayed back towards zero, otherwise you will continue to suffer that 2× modifier to points lost.
Return when you have a real diplomatic ship so that it won’t penalize you so much.
See Steve’s original posts for all of the details:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg118258#msg118258http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg118318#msg118318