Is that so? I’ve had a lot of fun with the game, but my major gripe is that losing is pretty boring. I have this one game where I joined an alliance and then we got attacked by another empire that wanted one of my allies to cede some planets to them. This invader was hugely more powerful than us and defeat was inevitable. But they took their sweet ass time kicking our butts so we could surrender and cut our losses. They have occupied a bunch of my planets but then seems to have stopped doing anything productive, so the war score is hovering at -40:ish and nothing much is happening. I took this opportunity to mount a bit more than a token resistance so I started producing ships. Blobbing together with some allied fleets (which just seems to turn up sometimes, what is the mechanism behind that?) I defeated a fleet or two of theirs and took back some of my planets, but that’s when their real army turned up and kicked my butt again. And then returned to doing nothing. I’m fully ready to let this stupid ally of mine that decided to aggro a big bad empire get vassalized or whatever, but I have no say in the matter and in the meantime half of my resource production is turned off. I mean, the point of occupying the territory of an ally of your enemy is surely to exert pressure on them, and I’m feeling thoroughly pressured, but I there’s no diplomatic option to ask your ally to give in, or to chicken out like a coward and get a huge relationship penalty with your allies. I just have to sit here in low production misery while the AI decides where it wants its fleets. Bouncing back and forth between irrelevant star systems is what they are doing right now.
I mean, what are my options?