Diplomacy in a sandbox game has no bearing on the backstory for Galactic Civilizations... Perhaps it should... but the whole point of the sandbox games are for you to create your *own* stories... hehe.

Actually, I'm getting rather annoyed that in my sandbox games, no one ever surrenders to me, even when I have close diplomatic relations with them. The AI players surrender to each other all the time, but never to the human player. Definitely a flaw in the logic of the game imho.

Cikomyr:
Had it the other way round a couple of days ago - the Drengin surrendered to the Torians. I was definitly amused by this.

ZTrooper:
Can't confirm this - I allready had AIs surrender to me.

I had one surrender to me ... didn't even see it coming.

I started a gigantic game with visions of entire star clusters a blaze with my foes, instead I was ostracized to a far corner with 3 small star systems and only 5 planets (none over 12 in rating) with the nearest star group far out of range. By the time I had enough life supported scouts to scan the nearby star group it turned out to be the home world of another race and every single planet was colonized and I was out of luck. So instead of a military victory I targeted a research victory.

Well a year goes by and the universe frankly didn't give a rat's rear end about me. My research was focused on star bases and in the end every one of my planets was boosted by 300% thanks to a dozen star bases. On top of this that every planet and star base was covered by a network of military star bases that made my pitiable fleet worth something (at the end of the game I had a military rating of 10!). Being well protected I focused on the tech victory tree and with my 5 worlds where doing 24% of all universal research. Things were going well.

At first I had only had contact with the race nearest me as they had early on colonized a large section of the galaxy. This not only crushed any hope of me expanding but also stopped me from meeting the other races. As time went on I met other races solely by running across their trade freighters as they intersected mine. The Terrans for whatever reasons took an immediate shine to my empire of 5 super planets. I kept my empire afloat by trading techs to minor and major races while the Terrans slowly became close. And for a time it was good

Then the wars started. While I was focusing on my little edge of known space the other races had finally finished colonizing every last planet and were now out of free space and out came the war fleets. At first the wars were incredibility random, peaceful neighbors starts tearing each other apart for class 4 worlds. At this point I spent almost all my time playing them like puppets. With my worlds slowly working down the tech tree and no fleets to build and move I was free to play diplomacy. Thankfully I had made good friends with my neighbor empire and while they prevented me from expanding in the early game they now worked as a buffer keeping anyone who wanted to hurt me far far away. I pitted empire against empire, traded techs to the empires I liked, and basically did all I could to keep things in chaos. My theory was that if they are busy fighting meaningless wars, the last thing they are watching is my small empire slowing researching away.

However, after about of year of constant war the empires where in shambles with only 2 out of 8 with positive treasuries. The mighty war fleets were mostly gone and peace once more reigned as they rebuilt themselves. At this point I allied with the Terrans and 2 others while the remaining 4 empires joined together as a second Alliance. Over the following year there are few wars, but when did do break out (thanks to the alliances) EVERYTONE got involved. Of course in the course of the game, I never fired a single shot or lost a single ship, I watched mainly through incredibly long ranged scouts and the super project at the end of the sensors tree.

At this point I was within stabbing distance of my goal, my worlds were running like well oiled machines, my star bases were well defended and armed, and the forces that wanted me dead were in shambles and so far away that I never saw their ships enter my territory.

Then the Terrans surrender to me. All of a sudden I had a dozen (horribly miss managed I might add) planets in the dead center of the universe bordering 2 of my enemies.

So they can surrender to you, although it might be the last thing you want.

(and in my game the Drengin and Torians were the first to ally)

I agree, great story!

What about the other races in your alliance? Anyone in the market to buy a few planets, cheap? (Anyone who wouldn't get too powerful from it and make you regret it later, at least...)

Good story! Did you consider the 'Destroy Colony' option? (never used it myself)

From DarkTalon's story, I can see that the Terrans learned nothing from the Great War=p

You know, having a race surrender to you can suck.

I was in a game where the Iconian had, through occupation and starbase, literally had Influence over the whole galaxy. I mean an entire grey screen here. No one elses colors showing. We were all losing planets to them en masse. I had been pushing my economy to get ships build so I could start taking there planets to hopefully reduce the influence, when out of the blue the Drengin surrendered to me. Now he had been having a worse time then me, his morale was worse then mine. All of a sudden I went from a 55% morale, to a 10%.

The only way I saved myself was gifting all those planets over to my ally.