States of Power Diplomacy Guide: Alliances, Pacts and War

Diplomacy is the system the developer leads with when describing multiplayer: “fast and brutal”, with global and private messaging built in, “your words are weapons too”. This guide lists what is actually confirmed to exist and where each item comes from.

The confirmed action list

Drawn from the in-game news feed captured in official screenshots plus the 1.0.11 patch notes:

The relations panel itself is named in the 1.0.11 notes: pacts “can now be set up in the diplomacy relations panel alongside wars, alliances, guarantees and the rest”.

War justification is now visible both ways

Before update 1.0.11 you were told when you finished justifying a war. You were not told when someone else finished justifying one against you. The patch changed that:

You are now told when another country finishes a war justification against you, not just when you finish one yourself.

This is a meaningful strategic change, not a UI tweak. Justification takes time, and knowing that a timer has run out on you is the difference between being surprised and being ready. If you played in the first three days, this warning did not exist.

Embargoes stack, and players notice

One of the most active threads on the game’s Steam forum is a player complaining, in capitals, about the number of countries that placed embargoes on them. The screenshots back this up: a single news panel shows Italy embargoing Belgium, Italy embargoing the United Kingdom, the German Reich embargoing the United Kingdom, and Japan embargoing the United Kingdom, all within three weeks of in-game time.

Embargoes are cheap for the AI to issue and they compound. Aggressive expansion has an economic cost delivered through diplomacy rather than through combat — see the economy guide.

Ideology drives who will deal with you

Your ideology — Democratic, Authoritarian, Communist or Fascist — is not cosmetic. Changing it visibly reshuffles the diplomatic map: the 1.0.11 notes mention the country list updating immediately after an ideology change, and a launch-week fix made units change their flags on ideology change. See ideologies and civil war for the mechanics.

Multiplayer diplomacy is a different game

Against humans, the systems above are the surface; the messaging is the substance. Global and private chat are built in, and official servers now filter chat to show only real players with their country names attached — so you can tell who you are actually negotiating with.

One caution: the 1.0.11 country-reservation change exists specifically “to fix malicious country changing”, meaning players were abandoning nations mid-game to grab better ones. Assume your counterparty has a reason for what they are proposing. Details on the multiplayer page.

What is not published

There are no published numbers for relation values, justification timers, or the thresholds at which the AI accepts an alliance. The action list above is complete as far as official material shows it, but it is a list of verbs, not a table of costs — and we are not going to invent the costs.