1. The Undermine ability: When the tool-tip mentions "round trip," what does that mean? Wouldn't it be best for it to work simply over time, or reduce allegiance increase rate by a set amount? What effect will this have on culture coming in and out of a gravity well?
Undermine may be removed or simply changed, but as of now it should no longer required the round trip. Tooltips are a bit behind on some of this and we apologize.
2. What is the use of the inter-species communication research? What effect does it have on the game, and why is it needed?
The idea behind the inter-species communications was that it would encourage players to get into the diplomacy tree by making it required for many of the diplomatic changes already available in the game (peace treaty, ship vision, etc). In the end this just ended up slowing down the game so we're going to remove this as a tech/requirement.
3. How do you "demand resources" of other factions? I can't find the command, even after getting the research.
The research tooltip on this is another example of something being a bit behind. Demanding resources has been changed to be a mission type, so now you can give someone a mission to give you certain amounts of resources with the idea that they'll accept it based on a reward, their faction standing with you, or both. Currently the mission AI is a bit... strict but we'll be fixing this in the near future.
4. Why can't factions share multiple pacts at once? They seem like three totally unrelated things.
We wanted to make choosing which pact to use a strategic choice, but we'll be changing this in the following weeks to be something more along the lines of letting you have one of each type of pact available to you.
5. What pirate changes have been made?
We've made the pirates a bit tougher (they'll now use a lot of the money you feed them throughout the game) and we'll be adding a few more things to the game to make them more interesting still. Be sure to keep watching for that stuff.
6. The new research trees for all 3 factions are identical, save for different organization and naming. Wouldn't it be more fun and realistic if there was a larger discrepancy between the races? They all have different fears and hopes, after all, and don't have the same motivation to "seek diplomacy."
Yeah, we mostly wanted to get rolling on the diplomacy stuff ASAP, so we used a lot of the same ideas initially, but we'll be adding more race specific things soon.
Also, I have a small suggestion: Why not place a "find envoy" button on the search function on the top left of the screen?
We'll be adding this in the future, just one of those things that we haven't quite found the time to do yet.
