Andrei Burago

This happened to me too. Yor had two miserable planets in the corner and suddenly one turn their influence covered the whole galaxy. In a couple more turns my planets started defecting. Unfortunately I did not save that game. I was so annoyed that I want back to the last autosave right away. After I reloaded the influence bug did not reproduce and I successfully conquered the galaxy. And only later it occured to me that I should have saved t

I will definitely buy a miltiplayer expansion when/if it comes out. I have burned a lot of time playing single-player games but nothing can be compared to multiplayer. They are the most memorable. One of the reasons some games don't get played in multiplayer is poor execution of the multiplayer feature. E.g. crashes, no simultaneous turns etc.