I was wondering how other people played in comparison to myself. In other games with diplomacy i'm always using it and paying attention to it. When it comes to diplomacy in GCIII I never try to negotiate anything. I never attempt to create treaties. I never trade for major or minor resources. These things do not seem to matter. The only time I ever used diplomacy is so I can buy a colony ship about to colonize a world I wanted to colonize. The open borders treaty does not seem useful to me, not to imply it is or is not, since ships do not seem to care about borders and the diplomatic negative is not noticeable. Non-Agression seems pointless since the AI just sends ships where ever it wants regardless of cultural borders/planet vicinity/starebase vicinity/etc. Research/trade treaties never seem to matter for me. I'm always behind in research because I out build the AI very easily, tons of ships with decent weaponry beats one or two ships with high weaponry. Since the AI doesn't use much in the way of defensive equipment my ships can outlast the AI's. I do concede I do turn of tech trading, but mostly because its annoying that the AI seems to(I could be wrong) trade them without much strategic 'thought.' Lastly I never trade for major or minor resources. Major ones do not seem to have a large enough impact to matter and minor resources even less. Which was my other thought, does anyone bother paying attention to what minor resources they have(besides tile placement) or what other races have and what you or they might want? I will make a decent effort to mine major resources for early game ships, but that's about it.
So I'm interested in how everyone else plays. I'm not looking to say what is good or bad in the beta, what needs to be improved, etc. I've already posted about that in my own and other people's posts. I'm more interested in how you play using diplomacy. How you use what and what you do not. As well as what you do with your resources, particularly minor ones.