Like it says on the tin.
Made friends with an NPR. They reciprocated the Friendly status.
Then they moved into one of my mining star systems and asked me to leave.
Will relations deteriorate toward war if I don’t leave?
…
Should I just go into SpaceMaster mode and delete the body that they’ve settled on?
They certainly can deterioate, Wether this is enought thats another question. How close if your mine to their homeworld for instance? how insistent are they? that sort of thing. Ask them to leave and see what happens. Certainly if you open fire relations will deteriate but other than that its hard to tell
The mining system is six jumps away from their home planet.
But they’ve recently colonized a body in this star system.
Our only presence in the star system is our Gallicite mining operation. No populated colony.
So far they are suggesting, not demanding.
Based on the diplomacy rules Steve reposted in another thread, they will almost certainly come to consider the system theres and expect you to leave. The populated colony is higher on the hierachy of control then a mining operation. If you want to claim a system and get an NPR to back down it helps to have a 10-20 million pop colony in the system.
So every time they ask you to leave your relations deteriorate slightly , you may be improving them more elsewhere but this dispute will hurt relations
Relations will be hurt by you ignoring their claim to this system, unless you make a counterclaim to the system and they accept it.
The more strength you have in the system, and the more military strength of yours they have seen in general, the more likely they are to accept your counterclaim.
All of that said, if you are doing diplomacy work with this NPR (by having a diplomacy ship they can detect somewhere), the benefit from that might offset the harm from your actions in this system. So you might still have stable relations for a very long time.