I did some combination of game start settings that made my save game a complete breeze. I think the Ai is having trouble keeping an Empire together maybe at lower difficulty because they are just throwing themselves at me as vassals. I don't even have my own ships anymore. It's just a hodgepodge of different corvettes, a few destroyers, and I saw a cruiser the last vassal I integrated. I made like 20 ships plus a few more the whole game and then scrapped them later.
I'm stuck in sprawl real bad, I keep having new vassals offer themselves to me just as I get the previous integrated and all the worlds the AI failed to rush to settle colonized.
However there is a growing despoilers empire to their west so maybe it makes sense from the Ai's point of view? There sure are a lot of slaves on that market I tell you what, I might play goblins next time instead of dwarves with the population changes.
I'm likely reaching the point where I should be splitting off vassals and not realizing it, but since my vassals are handing me navies of ships a tier or two above what I could make I'm still the biggest power.
I started with advanced empires off, 20 civs at start on 1000 star 4 spiral arm if I remember correctly. I think I set it to the difficulty that it defaults to with scaling off. In previous games advanced empires were what made me stop expanding easily. I turned them off but it might have changed the power balance really heavily towards the player. I think the next one maybe I'll try maxxing the advanced slider instead and see what happens. The empires I'm taking over are in really rough shape; they don't go for stability at all it seems like.On the bright side my alloys turned completely around after one of the larger vassals had a nice forgeworld with all industry districts; though it's amenities were tanked and it was unstable.
I thought it would have some form of tantrum spiral when consumer goods tanked from low stability from the flawed innoculation event causing the huge -20 happiness empirewide, but I just stopped building robots for 10 years or whatever it was and sold the advanced resources I wasn't using.
At some point I gave up on admin capacity and just started putting down resources until the borders finally settle.
I think I should start a new game, this one was too easy so far.
EDIT: I also made smarty research engineer dwarves instead of miner dwarves this time. That was because the game right before I was stuck in a tiny little box between advanced Empires and quit out after a century or so. I got the huge sprawl on the research player species and not the raw material player species of course.
EDIT2: It seemed like corporate governments were faring poorly, most if not all of my mini vassals that were not enlightened primitive species were rebels from corporate empires. I think the big vassals who requested to be my vassal were also corporate governments. The machine species empire I am bordering has managed to hang on, and Imperial and Dictatorships also seem to be surviving, though the two big ones are also despoilers and I think allied possibly. I still have a much larger fleet than them due to the inheritences. Maybe I just made a galaxy with me on one side, a number of corps in between and then a whole lot of slavers.
I think we can all answer this. I also feel like I maybe screenshot this before and made a similar comment, but maybe that's just awareness of what I would probably do.