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Gandalf Parker said:
I think all of this also goes with the requests that keep popping up to "add diplomacy to the game". Adding diplomacy options to a menu would place game-restrictions on the actions. Such as game-managed NAPs.
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It wouldn't necessarily restrict actions. In Master of Orion 2 you could establish an alliance, or a non-aggression pact. You could break either in a violent manner, there was nothing hardcoded that prevent you from doing so. However, the AI (and this tended to have a galaxy-wide effect) becomes very unpleasant towards a nation that repeatedly breaks treaties. If you are at war you could also declare a peace treaty that had a set number of turns in which you wouldn't attack one another. You could violate that, too, and if you did the diplomatic hit you took across the game was pretty significant.
Basically in MOO2 diplomacy just made the overall single player game more interesting, you could completely ignore it if you want, you could also, of course, use it to your advantage (make peace with strong neighbors while you work against weak neighbors and et cetera.) In multiplayer it was just a convenience factor, in that it let your diplomatic relations be expressed in an easy to see panel, without restricting any specific type of action.
Not that I want Dom3 to be MOO2, they are both great games and there's no reason to try to make one more like the other. It's just the first example that came to mind when thinking about diplomacy as it has been implemented in other turn based games. Thematically the lack of diplomacy may make sense, in MOO2 while one goal was galactic domination, there were multiple ways to win the game. In Dominions, you're a pretender god fighting against other pretenders to become the sole god, "there can be only one" so the story itself kind of makes diplomacy meaningless.