[dogscoff]

-Methinks that you are confusing War and Neutrality with some kind of Defcon system. War needs to be declared to the warring party, and Neutrality is only declared to YOURSELVES, not others.

That's what I'm saying - you don't need anyone else's permission. You just say "I'm neutral/ at war with you" and the other party just has to deal with it. On the other hand, you can't say "You're my ally" if that empire doesn't share your opinion.

-Why? Why do you need to be friends to have a treaty with others? Warring parties that hate each other's guts can still engage in a cease fire, a cold war can still generate trade between the nations and you can ally with lesser of the two evils.

You don't need to be friends to have a treaty, but if you're not friendly then certain treaty items are unavailable. That's all I'm saying. You might trade/gift resources with your enemy, but you wouldn't share all your intelligence gathering...

Without the diplomatic status feature, there would be no more treaty grid and no mechanism for declaring war.

I'm not sure I understand.

Well, you know you can have a standing order with your bank to pay the rent every month without you having to make a manual payment every four weeks... kinda like that.
Part of a treaty might be the regular payment of resources (or other commodities) to another empire. Rather than use up your one communication per turn and waste energy manually gifting X resources every turn, why not have a feature which makes the payment automatically?

"Party A, we kinda need that shipment of food badly. Why can't you give it to us?"

"Party B, sorry, we'd like to, but we can't. We just can't. Maybe it has to do something with you being neutral."

Certain treaty items would be available for exchange at the war and neutral levels, just not all of them.
"Party A: We kinda need detailed information of the whereabouts of all your ships. Why can't you give it to us?"
"Party B: Sorry, but we have no diplomatic status with you. We're not gonna give that kind of information to a complete stranger. Agree to partner status and then maybe we'll talk about it."

-Shouldn't it be automatically named? (ie: You picked resupply depot loan to the Cue Cappans: CueCappan-Terran Depot Loan)

Maybe, but you might want to use more elaborate roleplaying treaty names. Also, I'm not talking about naming each treaty item as you've indicated above, I'm talking about naming the entire treaty, which is made up of many treaty items. The individual treaty items would be labelled with automatically- generated identifiers.

-Also, there should be a time limit to renegotiations. You wouldn't like it if I first agreed on one thing, then say something that I forgot to put in something, lets scrap the whole thing and renegotiate. Speaking of which, there should be an Addendum feature.

Again, maybe, but I think players should have the free will to misbehave, so that diplomacy can get "interesting" from time to time. You're right, I wouldn't like it, but then I'd just cancel the treaty and be more careful about trading with you in future. I'd proabably also add you to my "assimilation" list=-)

I like the addendum idea.

-Manual Withdrawl? I think it should be Automatic. Also, the trade should drop automatically and the Research sharing should drop in 5-10-15% depending on the severity of the diplomatic incident.

Those are details to be worked out. There may be times when you agree with your ally to suspend certain items, but don't want to re-negotiate a whole new treaty.

For example, I'm paying 20,000 organics per turn in exchange for 20,000 rads per turn. The same treaty also gives us trade and research, full resupply & space port sharing, intel sharing and a bunch more stuff. Suddenly my main farming planet gets plagued and I can't pay my organics. I inform my ally, suspend that one item and he can suspend his rad payment (or not, if he's feeling generous) until I'm able to pay again. With automatic treaty suspension, we'd both lose all the benfits of the treaty for the sake of one minor item.

Perhaps each player should have in their empire settings an option marked "suspend treaty automatically if ally suspends items."

-Maybe generate macros for the AI?

This is an SE5 idea anyway so maybe the AI wil be up to it by then..?