Fucking attack me already, this isn't entertaining at all.
This could have been a bug unrelated to you having strong stations. I almost never see wars, but supposedly there's a bug that frequently causes empires to never send fleets to prosecute wars even if they have enough fleet power.
I lured them in but the combat seems a lot different, a lot of really stupid shit. The FTL no-go upgrade really should be available earlier, it's pretty fucking stupid that I can heavily fortify a chokepoint and then watch the enemy just bunnyhop over it and attack the systems that aren't hulked out.
Yep, I saw some discussion about where the developers were considering making it an automatic tech for this reason.
Also, how do you manage your fleet ? I try to set it up on the fleet manager and then reinforce.
It's a great way to use your starbases to build up but when it gets complicated (like during the contingency clusterpoo) I end up with dozen of 0 fleets on the manager and ships scattered everywhere, it's like the game forgot what's what at random.
Also the fed fleet became fully mine for some reason and the fed made another fleet. Not to mention how unreadable the fleet manager is.
As a whole the bugs made the game is super frustrating, I was planning to buy the DLCs but I'm considering ditching it.
Yeah, there are a lot of bugs with the merging fleets and the fleet manager. If you ever tell the reinforcing ships to do anything before they merge with the fleets they're reinforcing, they end up as separate fleets in the manager. If you manually merge fleets, you end up with 0-size fleets. I haven't seen anything else prevent merging from working, but I've read where other people have had the reinforcing fleets getting stopped for other reasons and causing similar bugs.
Also, reinforcing fleets love to suicide against the enemy on the way to the main fleet if you don't babysit them.
And... yeah, synthetic ascension is variously bugged and underpowered. I just saw a screenshot where a synthetically ascended empire couldn't colonize anything because colony ships still required food, for example. Machine empires got a buff in the 2.2.5 beta patch to at least address some problems with energy upkeep, but I'd honestly be surprised if synthetically ascended empires got the same buffs.
I really like this game and have played it for like 700 hours, but the game
is very buggy. My scientists keep getting randomly shuffled without my input, or get assigned to multiple slots, for example. That bug has been around for years at the least. The devs promised they'd spend more time fixing bugs after 2.2 had so many problems, but then kind of backtracked on that. We'll see if 2.3 ends up being a bigger bugfix release instead of another DLC with more bugs.