No, it's a known bug that Stardock has acknowledged. They said Evil civ's will not expand to areas where Influence from other civ's is too high (to avoid a flip planet situation). They said they were going to fix it, and hopefully they do. It is only noticable when playing on the largest of maps (huge, gigantic, immense). There is a huge discussion about it somewhere (under GalCiv II-Twilight category, called evil civ's not expanding).

One way you can alleviate this, is when setting up a new game, change any evil civ's 'personality' to generic. This will help them expand normal.

Also, Torians and Iconians (among others) don't like to build anything at all on many of their planets, anything bug. I may just play games with all Civ's on Generic, although it's bad this has to be done, in order to play a normal game.