Okay, so over the weekend I was able to 'squeeze' in two games of DA and while doing so noticed something that I hadn't seen before. First, the settings...
Medium galaxy/all abundant/scattered/nine majors/eight minors/normal diff/conquest victory/no tech trading/mega events on/fast tech... I play using a custom race, and this was the 1.6 Beta or whatever it is that Brad posted in the zipfile.
In both games I tried something totally different with regards to my research, both times totally ignoring the universal translator/diplomacy techs all together. It wasn't that I was purposefully doing so, it just happened that way since I was trying to get a head start on some weapons techs so I could play the galactic bully. Anyhow, in both games everything went pretty well with regards to bugs/issues and I only had two CTD's during this whole event, which is good to me! The only other thing I actually noticed was different ship designs 'disappear' on the screen when you park them in the same parsec, if the ships are the same design, they don't disappear... strange but workable unless you lose track of some constructors (they do disappear when stacked even though they are the same hull/design... weird), but I digress from my point.
My point is this, I didn't have the universal translator until the VERY END of both games, so obviously I could not communicate (and again, I didn't research any of those 'yellow' techs at all)until the end game, if at all... and no one bothered me. Wars were being fought all over the place but no one ever once looked my way. The only time any AI was even remotely 'aggressive' towards me came when I built a couple of influence starbases deep in Korath territory... they didn't like that and promptly issued me the standard move em or die dialog, which I did since I really didn't want war yet. What I am getting at is this NEVER happens in my games, ever. Someone always declares war on me early on, regardless of my military rating, and I've grown accustomed to that (plus I always research universal translators/diplomacy techs early on in the game). It just 'seems' to me that if you ignore the universal translator tech the AI will pretty much leave you alone.
Again, this was the first time I ignored researching the translator tech and it actually seemed to benefit me by taking me 'out of the loop' in a way. I'm going to try a few more games this way just to see if it continues, to see for myself of course but if anyone else reading this has experienced this before or is willing to start a new game and try it out for themselves, by all means do and please let me know what you find. Thanks for reading this long winded post!