Alliances

Your relations must be 'Close', and you need the Alliances tech researched.

Actually I found both races have to have the Alliance tech. I had to give it to one of the AI's so I could alliance with him and end the game.

That just isn't true at all. I've often allied with races that don't have the alliance tech. Gifting the tech can, however, boost relations far enough to make the alliance possible, which I think has led to this myth.

Are you sure? I've had times where I've been "close" with them for 3/4's of the game and had the alliance tech, and I could not do it until I traded them the tech. So until I see otherwise with my own eyes, I think both people have to have it. Am I right? Not sure.

I'm still trying to find how to get a civ to move from "friendly" to "close" in my current game. I have double plusses for trading, historic friendship, and military, one diplomacy and alignment, and one minus for "militaristic" yet they still won't grow close (even after donating hordes of money and ships to them). Yet the Yor, who don't even share my alignment, are willing to ally readily...

I've found that it is often important to have a stronger military rating than someone for them to ally with you. Also, I don't have any proof of this, but I think that the game may be purposely set up so that you cannot ally with everyone. Has anyone ever one a "pure" diplomatic victory where they did not have to conquer (or have conquered) or absorb any other races?

Not all of them. But I won by getting alied with three civilizations.

And yes, I do think a high military is important, because its one of the most important factors when rating how powerfull you are.

You can't gift a race to "close" relations, and you haven't been able to for many patches in Dread Lords. You can only bribe them as much as "friendly".

From my experience, you didn't need for both races to both have alliance tech for Dread Lords. I first noticed that this changed during Dark Avatar beta. You now do need to for both races to have the "alliance" tech to form an alliance.

I hope this helps.

In DA, my experience is that BOTH sides need alliance tech. That wasn't true in DL.

Heck, in DA I was saintly good Altarians trying to ally with saintly good Iconians, we were at "close" for a few turns, and I finally realized that I needed to give them alliances. Right after I clicked "send," the alliance option popped up.

Yes; recently, too, playing DA 1.50x (before the most recent patch and fix). I was playing a neutral-aligned custom race with the Super Diplomat ability. There were six remaining AI factions in a large galaxy, of all three alignments. It was fairly far into the game, but I hadn't been at war with anyone yet.

I was about to mix it up with the Krynn when I saved and quit for the night. After reloading the save the game crashed every time I hit the end turn button. This happened every time, no matter how I played the turn.

Eventually I noticed that I was 'close' with all of the AI factions, so I tried for a blitz alliance victory. I managed to get alliances with everyone, though I had to give the Thalans Black Hole Projectors to secure theirs. This time when I pressed end turn, I got the victory screen. Not a bad score considering I only had twelve planets, so I just posted it while I could.