I am sooooo happy to see that many of you are also disappointed with the AI Surrender - Dead World change. I have fingers crossed that some of your suggested changes may come to pass.
The first time I saw the dead world surrender happen, I was really upset. I had taken a huge number of turns to amass a fleet clear across the map to invade an AI civilization, and suddenly he surrendered and all the worlds became dead. What a collosal waste of time for me to put this invasion together.
Some might say "just turn off AI surrendering". Well, I don't like that because it makes the game drag on a lot longer.
I also want to report a crash situation I am having that is related to the dead worlds. Initially, my game was crashing when an AI with a bunch of worlds tried to surrender. I checked on Steam and saw that there was a "Opt In" patch to resolve this. The patch worked and I was able to finish that game.
In the next game, I got to a situation where an AI had only 1 world left and he was at war with another AI. He tried to surrender at that point and give his single world to me. The game crashes as soon as the surrender message pops up on the screen. This seems to be a use case that wasn't resolved by the Opt In patch.
---
I realize that some of the suggestions people have made would be hard to incorporate into the user interface. Maybe an XML file with all the parameters. This would be nice since we could then mod the XML file if we still found it needed tweaking.