They actually wiped out the Drengin for me in the first campaign map. That was my first Gal Civ II game, so I was the worthless ally that time. They managed to colonize a planet in the drengin system and wiped them out shortly thereafter... I never even SAW a Drengin ship aside from their initial scout.
Even planets you have no colonization techs for are still useful. It doesn't take much in the way of an economy bonus for them to be profitable once they reach 6.00 billion people. Once you buy a basic farm outright on them, you can let those "useless" planets sit there increasing your population, paying you a decent amount of taxes, and getting you re-elected.
Think about the headache that having differentiated soldiers would become. You'd have to have some sort of way to track which of your billions of citizen soldiers are which, some way to control which ones you load into a transport etc. While some kind of elite troop type sounds fun in practice, it wouldn't really work too well in Galactic Civ II.
No, you can't orbit planets that you don't own. You can still use ships to get in your opponent's way, but you can't completely block them unless you have eight ships surrounding the planet.
Add "peace treaty" to the negotiation screen. You can 'buy' a peace treaty just like anything else on their side of the diplomacy screen, but you need to specify that it's what you want.
You can move your mouse over the morale in the planetary view to see a breakdown in planetary morale. You'll probably find that population is killing your morale. The morale penalty grows exponentially as you get a larger population, so the practical limit for planetary population is pretty low. There's also a ceiling on how much benefit you get from racial abilities, so I don't think a race with 300% morale would have any advantages to one with a 200% morale, that's why you don't seem to be
Or maybe it could be like the universal translator. As long as [U]you[/U] have alliances you have the option of proposing them just like only those with universal translators may open race communications.
I've seen that, it seems to be the result of the game waiting for one of your ships to move (maybe related to the autopilot leftover movement error?). The turn button usually came back (along with the computer taking its turn) if I tried moving all my ships to someplace they could reach in one turn. I witnessed this in the 1.80e build, but I'm guessing it's the same issue.
