Diplomacy Mode switches off player combat for your whole account. While it is on, nobody can attack you, spy on you or hit you with missiles, and you cannot do any of those things to anyone else either. It is free and you can leave it on as long as you like. What it costs is production: your mines run at a fraction of their normal rate the entire time.
You turn it on and off from More then Settings then the Protection tab. Either direction takes 24 hours.
Turning it on and off
Press Activate and a 24 hour timer starts. Nothing changes while it runs. You can still be attacked for the whole 24 hours, and your mines still run at full speed. When the timer finishes, the protection switches on and the production penalty starts at the same moment.
Switching off works the same way in reverse. You stay protected, and you stay penalized, for the full 24 hours it takes to come out.
A Cancel button sits under the progress bar. Canceling leaves you in whatever state you were already in, and you can start the change again straight away.
Two things will stop you from starting it:
- You cannot start it while an attack or espionage fleet of yours is on its way to a target. Fleets already heading home do not block it.
- You cannot start it if your Resources Spent Points are 100 or less. Nobody can attack you at that size anyway, so the game will not let you pay the production penalty for nothing.
Diplomacy belongs to the account, not to a planet. Abandoning the planet you happened to be on when you pressed the button does not cancel anything.
There is one shortcut. When your newbie protection runs out, the popup that tells you so offers an Enter Diplomacy Mode button, and that one takes effect immediately with no 24 hour wait. It is a one time offer and it is only on that screen.
The production penalty
Your mines are cut by a percentage that depends on your Resources Spent Points, which you can look up on the leader board.
| Resources Spent Points | Production cut |
|---|---|
| Under 50,000 | 25% |
| 50,000 to 99,999 | 50% |
| 100,000 or more | 75% |
The Settings panel names the band you are in and the exact figure before you commit to anything, so there is no need to work it out yourself.
The cut lands on ore, crystal and the hydrogen your Synthesizer makes. It does not touch energy, and it does not reduce what a Nuclear Power Plant burns, so a planet that leans hard on nuclear power can end up with almost no hydrogen left over. Here is the same planet before and after, at the 75 percent band:
Mission payouts drop too. The diplomacy figure is one of the terms in the mission reward multiplier and Expedition Tech adds on top of it, so the more Expedition Tech you have the smaller the hit feels. On a player with Expedition Tech 4, a 75 percent penalty takes the mission multiplier from 2.2 down to 1.45.
Nothing else is taxed. Debris you harvest, resources you move between your own planets and anything you swap at the Merchant all arrive in full.
What you can still do
- Build, research and terraform as normal
- Transport and deploy between your own planets and moons
- Colonize new slots, and deploy or move a Hephaestus Class Attack Platform
- Harvest debris fields
- Fleet save
- Send group defense to alliance mates and buddies, and receive it from them
- Run missions, at the reduced payout
- Swap resources at the Merchant
- Run Oracle scans
What you cannot do
- Attack anything, and that includes NPC encounters, not just players
- Spy on anyone
- Launch missiles
The NPC part is the one that surprises people. PVE Mode, the paid protection in the Store, leaves NPC farming alone. Diplomacy does not. If you want protection and you still want to farm encounters, diplomacy is the wrong tool.
The Galaxy page still draws the spy and attack icons on every row, and they are not greyed out. The refusal turns up when you open the fleet screen.
The block is on you for the whole switch on period as well, not just once the protection is live. From the moment you press Activate you can no longer attack, spy or launch missiles, even though you are not protected yet. That is deliberate. It stops anyone from using the countdown as a free shield while their own fleets are still in the air.
Because every attack is blocked, you also cannot score in Alliance Incursions. Those are counted by attacks flown into the sector.
What other players cannot do to you
While your protection is live, nobody can attack, spy on or missile any of your planets or moons. Their attempts come back with "Target is protected by diplomacy mode". Oracle scans still find you, but the spy button on your row is disabled for whoever is looking.
Two things still get through:
- Anything already in the air. Nothing is re-checked when a fleet arrives, so an attack or probe launched before your protection switched on lands normally. Remember the protection starts 24 hours after you press the button, not when you press it.
- Anything aimed at you while you are inactive. See the next section.
Going inactive suspends the protection
This is the part that catches people out. If you go 7 days without logging in, your diplomacy protection stops working and other players can attack you again. The setting stays switched on and the game keeps reporting it as Active, so nothing on screen tells you what happened. Logging in restores it straight away and there is nothing else to do.
We email you a day before it happens, around the 6 day mark, unless you have switched that email off under Settings then Notifications. If you know you are going to be away, Vacation Mode is the right tool instead.
If a battle report ever lands on a diplomacy account, it carries a line saying diplomacy did not apply to that battle, so the report explains itself rather than looking like the protection failed. See inactive players for the rest of what goes wrong after 7 days away.
How it looks in the Galaxy
- d in green means that player is protected by diplomacy mode.
- ! in amber means their diplomacy is changing. It is the same marker whether they are switching on or switching off, so it does not tell you which way they are going.
- No marker means diplomacy is off. A player who has gone inactive loses the d as well, which is your clue that they can be hit.
The Legend button at the bottom right of the Galaxy page lists every letter. Your own planets carry the d too, so you can see at a glance that it is working. The status is also on the Overview page, in the planet panel down the left hand side.
Diplomacy, PVE Mode and Vacation Mode
Three different tools that are easy to mix up. All three live on the same Protection tab in Settings.
| Diplomacy Mode | PVE Mode | Vacation Mode | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free, paid for in production | Credits, from the Store | Free |
| Takes effect | After 24 hours | Immediately | Immediately, 48 hour minimum stay |
| Runs out | Never, you switch it off | When the days you bought are used up | When you come back |
| Attack NPC encounters | No | Yes | No, you are locked out |
| Group defense | Yes | No | No |
| Oracle scans | Yes | NPC targets only | No |
| Production | Cut 25% to 75% | Normal | Paused |
| Still protected while inactive | No, stops after 7 days | Yes | Yes, up to 35 days without a login |
| Marker other players see | d | P | v |
Small print
- Diplomacy is per account and per universe, not per planet. Every planet and moon you own is covered.
- You get an in game notification when the 24 hour change finishes.
- NPC encounters are never anchored to a player in diplomacy mode, and you are not counted when the game works out how many a region should have, so the map around you thins out.
- An admin can switch diplomacy on or off for an account, and you are told when that happens.
- Account sitters are allowed to toggle diplomacy on the account they are sitting. That is one of the few things the rules let a sitter do.
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