Comment 19 for bug 894943

Just heard about this diplomacy thing (that's the downside of jingoism, I suppose), so forgive me if this refers to stuff that goes counter to Ares's diplomacy system.

There should be a button (the ally button) in the diplomacy sidebar that acts like the sell button, only by clicking it multiple times it cycles through your allies and you. Clicking on any of your TechnoTypes while an ally is selected with the button will give that ally control. Clicking on an ally's TechnoType while you are selected via the ally button will ask that ally to transfer control over to you. Right-clicking while in ally button mode will take you out of ally mode, just as right-clicking while in sell-mode will take you out of sell mode. The ally button will be the house color of the selected ally (which defaults to yourself).

This will be represented by an ally icon (set to the house color of the sender for the receiver) with an exclamation mark next to it for a granted request or a question mark for a request. To clear a request or retake a building, select yourself with the ally button and click the building.

For sanity's sake, I'm making a few sub-optimal decisions:
* You can't have and "everyone" in the ally menu, since you probably couldn't have that without extensive ASM
* You can't transfer a TechnoType in the middle of building something (or rather you can, but it will abort construction since you may well reclaim a second construction yard and be building an Allied barracks *while building a Soviet Barracks you lack the prerequisites for!*

I'd suggest putting an [TechnoType]>AllySell= flag, so you can have the following cases:
*If it's 0, you can't sell it if it isn't yours (Construction Yard).
*If it's 1, you can sell it, but the original owner gets the money (for the Nuclear Reactor).
*If it's 2, you can sell it and get money for it regardless of who's it really is (might sound stupid, but let's face it: we do awesome stuff with stupid ideas all the time in this community).

Instead of a diplomacy menu, there should be a diplomacy sidebar. The objectives menu works because it pauses. It wouldn't work if whenever you stopped to look at your objectives the tanks were still killing you. If by diplomacy menu you mean like temporarily replacing the map like the score screen does, though, or some other overlay rather than something like that takes you out of the action like the pause screen, that'll work.

P.S. Anyone know where this diplomacy menu issue is? I did a quick search and all it gave was this topic.