Were the Drath at war with anyone?

Drengin and Korath.

If that had been me, they would have surrendered to to Drengin or Korath. I can't count the times that one or the other AI "casts it's fate" with an enemy even when my military is number one and my relationship with them was warm.

I have never been able to figure it out

I think part of the problem is that the AI only seems to look at military rating when evaluating its strength. And based on that it decides to declare war or to surrender.

A human player on the other hand always evaluates a complex set of variables:
- Of course also military rating, but at a very low priority
- Tech level. At least for me, that's the single most important factor. With high enough tech level, I can totally obliterate the galaxy with just a handful of techs
- Production capability. Most of the time I play sitting duck with almost no military. Why pay upkeep if I can just produce ships on an as-needed basis?
- Positions. No point in declaring war on an enemy on the opposite side of the map
- Preoccupation. Am I at war? Is my enemy at war with someone else? Looks like this is at least partially implemented: "Too busy risking war with us at the moment" or so on report screen. AI still likes to declare war on multiple enemies at a time though.
- the here and now
- the big picture

While some of these points are very hard to implement (the last two), others should be fairly easy. For example before declaring war, the AI should at least check if it has combat ships capable of reaching the enemy.

The AI in GC2 already is one of the best I have seen so far, yet still there is lots of room for improvement.

Interesting, will try that next time I play with tech trading on. My last couple of games have been blighted by unnecessary surrenders, as well as Terrans (who I've just been ranting about elsewhere) steadfastly refusing to develop any kind of military. Anything that could solve both would be most welcome.

IIRC, there was a similar extra-wacky surrenders thing during (and maybe shortly after) the DA beta. I played with surrenders off for quite a while, but in my last few DA games I didn't see anything too far from the baseline weirdness.

My guess is that the folks asking about why the computer players seem to ignore their economic (and tech too, maybe?) strength is the real problem. But that's only part of the muddle--it covers the Why question but doesn't say much about who gets chosen to inherit the surrender-monkey's real estate.

Still going on in beta 6. Was just playing a game with 9 AI opponents that had the Drengin go on a mad declare on war everybody rampage, and I mean that literally, and the Korx surrendered to the Drengin despite being on the other side of the map (immense size) and having not lost a single planet.

The trouble is, that with the emerging different ship building priorities for the racial AIs, it's making games predictable. Races who prefer to research up to mediums/larges or build lots of freighters instead of warships, like the Altarians and the Korx, seem to be surrendering left, right and centre in my games and everyone else's. Interestingly, the Terrans seem to have found a way around this with their no-attack defenders, which I'm guessing is just enough of an illusion of a military to keep them from surrendering, as long as no-one just destroys all their useless ships. At least, that's my theory since the Terrans don't seem to surrender as often as the Altarians despite having a similar long-term ship-building strategy (i.e. holding off on weapons research and going after big hulls). But it is irritating to have games constantly dominated by races like the Drengin, Korath, Yor and Torians who go after the early military rating with lots of small, slow, all-weapon ships and aggressive wars - I'd love to see even one game where the dominant power was the Altarians or the Korx.