Today I learned that when an NPR accepts your sovereignty over a system it will transfer any colony it has there over to you. I got a friendly NPR to spawn within 3 jumps from Sol and it was the first contact for my Empire, we have been growing alongside one another for over a century now with good relations. In that time it got too big for it’s britches and began growing into my territory. I had a real colonial dispute with this NPR in one of the systems I believed was mine, I made a colony after invading a spoiler world there, and then later noticed that there was a lot of neutral traffic there. After a naval patrol I noticed they had an actual colony in another planet in that system… One I was already terraforming. They showed up, realized that I had already done the work for them to be able to live there (they prefer really cold climates) and now had a pop there. I had to quickly dump infrastructure in the other world, move people there, then send them a demand for them to leave, they accepted but then I realized I owned one of their pops! 15 Million of their own.
I was not really gunning for a multi-race Empire, but I couldn’t keep the terraformers on as they would choke out the aliens on the planet… What made it worse was that they looked like little robotic dog guys. I can’t just let them all die. I decided to make a habitat world where they are allowed to live and reproduce freely, but their world will never be allowed to industrialize or expand into the stars. I suppose they are a bit like an Amish community now, taken care of by a garrison of human troops and a Corvette in orbit. I love how the game’s deep mechanics generate these interesting narrative moments.