First, it's a great idea to keep a healthy cash balance.   Second, one ought to be able to refuse any "gifts".   Just because someone wants to surrender doesn't mean you should have to accept.    I should always be able to say, no, going to kill you.   Third, one should be able to see what the total bill is going to be if one upgrades multiple ships ---- and a corollary to this is that one ought to see a summary of what one gets if the other guy surrenders.   Maybe I don't want his worthless planets that just add to my LEP!

This stuff needs to be worked out an I think will be.

Yeap.. I was a childish. Tired and more stuff was going wrong. Never the less GC3 need more polish and yes.. i will most likely play it soon again.

"Creative" was op

you could probably raze all the buildings on his former planets to cut the maintenance, set them to full wealth generation and slowly start start building some of them up as "wealth" planets. it's usually not a bad idea to have at least one planet fully specialized in wealth (with the economic capital and lots of markets/shopping centers). a single planet can pay the bills of a medium sized empire failry easily.i usually do that quite early - the homeworld is my first factory world, the first 2-3 colonies get mainly research and one of the next few planets will be the primary money maker. once the buildup is done, it will sit on 100% wealth (or rather, 99% wealth, 1 pit of manufacturing and economic stimulus ) for the rest of the game, funding dozens of specialized reseaarch and production worlds and lots of fleets.

add some more wealth planets when your empire frows or if you want surplus cash for some rush buying or ship upgrades. upgrades are  more or less a waste of money in this game, though. just build new ships with the new tech. there is no experience system, which would be the primary reason to upgrade obsolete ships with new guns etc. as it is now, there is literally no difference between building a new ship and upgrading a veteran (except that the upgrade costs thousands of credits while building a new ship only costs 1-2 turns of production on a manufacturing planet)

that being said, yes, it would be nice to be able to refuse their surrender.

There needs to be an option to refuse any gift, not just to refuse surrenders. 

It should also piss off the other empire when you refuse a gift.  (At least a single "-" worth of diplomatic penalty, for at least 25 turns.)  There's no such thing as a free gift.

On the plus side, diplomacy is something Draginol talked about in the Steam forums Memorial Day AMA.  Improvements to it will be a part of the first major content patch post-release.  (So accompanying the first DLC.)  I seem to recall him alluding to features such as what's being asked for here.  But it cannot hurt to indicate that this is a much-desired diplomacy feature.  They took fan feedback very well during the Early Access period and I'm sure that our feedback continues to be of value.

Brute please fill out a ticket and include your save file. That is the best way to resolve these issues. This is clearly an unintended bug. 

The getting the negative balance is probably just something that didn't occur to the developers when giving you their balance, fairly easy to patch I would imaging just a bit of code to set the balance to 0 if it's negative before adding it to your balance. Maintenance could still be an issue though so I do still think they should add an option to refuse surrender or gifts.

the governance sliders don't always move back to their default position.
I filed a bug report to this, and it seems, to me at least, is that if I change the default position of the sliders (say, more economy than research) before going bankrupt, the sliders never come back to normal once I'm in the black.

When an AI surrenders to me, I first look at their colonies to improve them, then I check their ships.  They are usally way lower tech than mines, so I destroy them, along with any stranded shipyards, that saves some money/turn and it speeds up your economic recovery

As for the negative balance immediatly after the transer, it might be a bug, so as others said, file a bug report.

Firstly, how can they even *have* a 2k debt? I don't get it.

Secondly, this happened to me as well - however I found that on one world I got from them they had *just* purchased a shipyard. I cancelled it as it was still not built, got all the money back, and was right back to where I should've been with cash. It might have been a similar instance.

I actually think this all sounded organic and awesome. That's a good strategy. The only real lack here is the player should be presented with some minimal info on what's being given/surrendered and given a choice whether to take it or not as econundrum1 suggests here.