Thanks for the comments people !!
-> geoschmo: I think the mechanism to calculate who did the most damage to you is already implemented in SE4 - Think about it: how is the SCORE calculated ?? Anyone doing something to your empire that lowers it's score could be recorded. Then if you surrender, the code just has to lookup who did the most damage and that would be the receiving empire. Here I would add another Idea: An option to set the Minimum percentage of 'Score points' to loose before you are allowed to surrender. For instance, you could set this % to 25%: This would mean that you CANNOT surrender unless you lost 25% of your Current total score -> and then you would be able to surrender to the empire that did the most of this damage. This has the added benefit of making it harder to surrender to friends...
-> Baron Munchausen: your said "The AI in Master of Orion would surrender to one of your rivals just to spite you. That was one of the most realistic features of the original MOO AI. I liked it"
Woa !! Relistic ? Do you mean realistic as what happends in real life ? I don't think France surrendered to the British when the Germans invaded it in world war II ... Could you explain what You mean exactly ?
-> Baron Munchausen: "I'm not in favor of any hard coded game restrictions" - I agree completely with you. That is why my original message says "Option" ... Magic word here
-> DavidG: That's a nice idea ! (limiting what you can to in Diplomacy) - But it should be optionnal (magic word again
-> geoschmo: "We had a long drawn out discussion on this forum a while back about whether surrendering to an ally or not is realistic. Basically it depends on your point of view"
Hmmm I would be curious to know how the proponents of surrendering to an Ally while you are invaded justified their point of view !!!
-> ZeroAdunn: "Surrending to an ally is realistic" - See my comment to the Baron
cheers !
RiTz21