Initial setups...
 

[0.99]

Started a game with my usual settings (large universe, 3 good planets each, high resources, high race points. Time/APS, bloodthirsty workers ;-))...

...and noticed that an AI (Drus., methinks) homeworld was in one of my two systems. By the end of the second turn, I've got it blockaded. No ships belonging to it are noticed.

Several turns later, after numerous invasion attempts and less roughly 3.9 billion people, it surrenders -- yielding *just* that planet. Odd. Stranger is that later in the game, I've now explored 30-odd systems, and there were NO other races within 3 warp points of that poor sod, except for a neutral race (the Cluk-Luks) which stayed in their system.

So why would an AI start with only 1 planet? An idea that comes to mind is if there were no other rock planets with the same atmosphere nearby, but... or, somehow, if the other two planets were far away and also destroyed/taken as tribute by somebody else, but they'd have to have been pretty far away...

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

Re: Initial setups...
 

I had a similiar problem: starting a game with 5 planets, all the AI races have started with 5 planets, but I only had 3...
I sent a report to MM.