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It also smells a little fishy in terms of AI fairness vs. the player... like all the AI races actually know who the players are in a game, before any official contact, and they're making backroom deals based on that information. The player isn't privy to that info about un-contacted races in the game. I thought the GalCiv AI is supposed to be programmed so it doesn't have any artificial advantage the player doesn't have, at evenly-balanced difficulty settings.
To be fair, I believe you can do this when you play the Drath yourself, make wars with civilizations neither of you have contacted yet. So it isn't really a player vs. computer knowledge issue here, its simply an issue of an unrealistic super ability of the Drath. I can imagine the conversation going something like this:
Drathi diplomat: 'Hey, you know those Iconians, the one neither of us knows for sure exists but the Arceans keep telling us stories about'
Drengin ambassador: 'Yeah, sounds like another weakling race ready to be enslaved'
Drathi diplomat 'I want you to go to war with them'
Drengin ambassador: 'but we don't know where they are at, even if they do really exist'
Drathi diplomat 'Here's 400 BC and a couple of our star cruisers'
Drengin ambassador: '... I get it, these are one of your games of pretend that you aliens like to engage in. For the sake of these useful gifts I'll 'play along' as you call it and tell the Arceans to pass along the fact that I declared war against the Iconians.'
