What causes a "rep hit" or a "attitude hit" and how can I improve myself, if I do get a hit?

Attitude hits are the things that trigger the words "polite", "cautious", "furious" and so on in the Diplomacy screens. Attitude hits come from anything that would make YOU angry if you were the other civ: when you refuse to pay them tributes they demand, when you tell them "get your troops out of my territory or declare WAR!", when they tell you to get YOUR troops out of THEIR territory (either of those last two causes an attitude hit even if the demand to remove troops is obeyed!), when you actually declare war on them, when you kill lots of their units, etc. Oh yeah, and razing cities causes an attitude hit with EVERYBODY.

Reputation is how far the other civ will trust you. You may be hated by everybody else on earth, but you may still be considered trustworthy (screwy as that sounds). A bad reputation comes from things such as signing an ROP with somebody, moving troops into their territory, and then attacking them (this is called an "ROP rape"); violating a mutual protection pact; i.e. breaking your promises in general. I believe making an alliance with, say, China, and against France, and then not sending in any troops to actually fight France, may cause you to lose reputation with China. Not sure there.

The attitude is described here here (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=44999) by Bamspeedy.

BasketCase is right that Reputation and Attitude are two different things. A bad reputation is far worse than a bad attitude.

But the example of the ROP rape goes even further. When you have troops in the territory without a ROP and decalre ar, your reputation is stained too.

It is perefectly OK for your reputation to NOT send troops while you have an MA though. As long as you don't make peace before the MA is up or cancelled by your MA partner (which causes a rep hit for that civ).

Thanks for you help guys! Now I understand why in my last game all the AI were either annoyed or furious at me.

Anyone knows if there is a penalty for using other nation's workers? In Bamspeedy's article it says there is a penalty only if you disband them, not if yo uactually employ them to improve the terrain.

Then I would think that he's right.

But what if you treat them nicely by joining them into your cities?

I understand that it is better to use foreign workers, because despite they work slower they do not cost you anything. However, I was wondering if having slaves would annoy my neighbours, because it's been hundreds of years and they are still furious at me...