It probably isn't, but I'd consider them defenseless because they have a single farking planet and are considered "minor races," not because of some UP law.

This situation takes on a lot more importance when the minor race in question is the Jagged Knife and they have Doom Rays against your Laser IVs. Declare war and poof! their navy disappears.

Minor races aren't part of the UP.

Yeah, that doesn't seem consistant.

It's probably been mentioned before but it'd be nice in GalCiv 3 if the minor races had more of a role in the flow of the game. In certain games i've played one or two minor races have become powerful enough to last through to right near the end.
I've noticed, though never done it, that the player can leave the UP (and thus not be affected by its resolutions?).... wouldn't it be cool if a minor race could become powerful enough to be able to join the UP? Allowing for them to be not almost completely useless as they are at the moment.

The current game i'm playing had my spies working with the Lentzlandian gov. to steal techs from other races... problem with this was that i hadn't met the Lentzlandians nor did i have spy tech at that point in the game.... It was obviously some sort of administerial error

The bug is that the Minor's militaries are being moved AWAY from their systems, instead of back towards them as the UP resolution appears to be intended to do.

Except, like I said, minor races are not part of the UP.

Last I checked, Islamic Law doesn't apply to me because I'm not part of an Islamic country.

Oddly, some of the more militant adherents would disagree with you on that.

But on topic, if you want to go for an extreme solution, try this - if your influence covers the entire map, no one's ships get towed anywhere when you declare war. Since there is no where to tow them, everyone's ships stay right where they are. Just don't ask what I was doing when I discovered this  

This may not be a bug.


But the minor races ships should be moved back to their home world or one space off from it.


I have also said this in the past. Minor races should not be considered part of the UP unless they have some kind of collected vote in it. Also Jagged Knife and the other one that takes planets away from the majors should not be minor races. Just because they have dumped their respective governments doesn't mean that they have given up on all of their ideas of a galaxy wide empire. Specifically the Jagged Knife on this one. Since that is what they are trying to do in the first place according to the description of the event.

So you don't like how minor civs are exploited and dominated by the spacefaring civilizations, where they're subject to social structures and laws that they have no say in?

This never happens in the real world...   

I'm not talking about the UN. I'm talking about what the more powerful nations do to less powerful nations.

For example - and I'm not trying to start an abortion argument, just pointing out a real example - the Bush administration gives aid to clinics in Africa under the provision that they not offer or even mention abortion. If they offer abortions, they lose the aid from the US. This has an actual impact on those nations, for good or ill.

There really is a lot of stuff that's abstracted in GalCiv, but it's entirely realistic for the minor civs to face real consequences if they don't play ball with the UP, and that kind of thing is easily abstracted. Sure, they can hold their own sometimes, but they only have one world each and it really would only take a single civilization getting a burr up their butt to wipe them out.

Bug, design flaw, oversight, unintended consquences . . . whatever label you put on it, it's still something that needs to be changed.