Surrender - a new diplomatic option

Hi Kharn, thanks for the kind words, and welcome to the forums!

The game does require all outposts to be conquered in order for an empire to be removed from the game. There's pros and cons of requiring that. However, these days I'm inclined to agree that when you lose all colonies you should probably lose the game, even if you have outposts left.

It can be argued that a colony can still rebel a couple turns later after being conquered, but for the sake of simplification it probably should only require colonies to be conquered to remove a player from the game. I'll consider implementing this for the next update.

As for your 'Surrender' suggestion, yes, that is something that will probably get in at some point, where the AI surrenders to the human player or to other AIs. We'll see.