I'm playing my first game as boring old friendly humans. I've been doing pretty good so far, I made a space federation with some other aliens and we've been happily picking apart some xenophobic bird people that had been giving us all problems since the start of the game.
Then... a fallen empire woke up and declared war on our space federation. Actually first they gobbled up some other empire (so they have a bunch of planets) then they declared war on us.
They have a really massive fleet - ~366,000 strength, and a second fleet ~200,000 strength, and they are building a third fleet (~15,000 so far). My fleet is ~30,000 and my allies are all less than that (~15,000 max) so there's absolutely no way we can possibly beat them in a straight up fight.
I'm managing to hold them off by basically abusing the broken stupid AI - I fly a single corvette into their home territory, which triggers every single enemy ship to retreat to defend, then I fly my main fleet in to blow something up somewhere else. It's.... sort of working, but honestly I'm stalling for time and not much else - they are too fast, I don't have time to bombard anything, and blowing up outposts etc does not give any warscore (...why? attacking the enemy economy should give something) so it's basically just a matter of time before I'm a little bit too slow and get blown apart (already had a few close calls).
My allies are completely, 100% useless. I don't know what they are doing, but it seems like a whole lot of nothing. Despite the fact I'm tying up both enemy fleets almost 100% of the time, they aren't attacking anywhere or capturing anything, just flying their fleets around in circles in their own territory.
I don't know what to do. I'm already sitting at basically max fleet cap - I'm leveling up my last few spaceports to max, but I'm not going to squeeze more than 2,000 more fleet power out of that at best. Tech progression does not seem to make enough of a difference to matter either - I'm not going to double my power so just forget about getting the 10x more power I need.
Is this game lost? And if yes - is there any way to actually beat them, or is it just a fancy "game over, you lose" screen?