Continued playing and reached the Victory condition of 60% of all habitable planets being in Federation space which just got me a rather disappointing Victory screen. I was in the middle of upgrading my 100K fleet with the new Jump Drive and weapons I'd researched when my Federation partners declared war again, so I tried to make the best of it and decimate the Themlar Compact Empire to the West a bit, going in with my fleet and splitting it in two as I usually do against weaker enemies creating two 40K stacks and killing em dead:
When all of a sudden a fucking portal opens up in the system I had just been fighting in and several 60K stack enemies flood out of it declaring me to be food, I had just lost 20K Fleet strength before I realized what was happening and Warped the fuck out of there quick, hoping I am not doomed since there are no Reloads and I was already in the middle of a war:
From there they spread out across the galaxy eating unsuspecting planets and species along the way, the Themlar Compact got the brunt of it, but they got into my territory too and ate like ~4-5 of my planets and destroyed several vassals slowly making their way to Sol and my core systems while I retreated to Earth and the systems around, upgrading my Fleet and building additional shit with every bit of minerals I still had (and trading Energy and other resources for more):
Worse yet, while this was going on my Experienced Fleet Admiral died of old age and left me with 20K or so less Fleet strength, so I had to hire a new one and built the Fleet up as strong as I could till the minerals ran all out while they were devouring my outer worlds and seemingly multiplying their Fleet since they had like at least 6-7 50-60K fleet stacks, leading to a valiant last charge at the system they appeared in, at least the previous war had ended meanwhile:
Alas, more and more of their Fleets came jumping in, I managed defeating three of them and another two appeared with even more on the way, leaving me no other way than to get the fuck out of there again with less than 90K Fleet strength left since they were attacking and decimating my expensive battleships from the rear, at least the new Admiral had gotten some much-needed experience and was Lvl5 afterwards boosting the strength of what remained:
So one more attempt to wipe them out, after another bit of building up my Fleet while they were eating more worlds and two more battles against them trying to save random systems of mine, I ran into them again and sustained more losses:
After a while one of those Dormant Empires woke up, since they had gotten close to their territory and were presumably starting to attack them too:
So while I was fighting my way back to their portal they demanded I become their "Satellite", the Remains of the Themlar Compact and a few other Empires had already agreed, since I didn't know how much of the Unbidden there still were left and upon looking at their Fleet power being "Superior", all the shit they had gathered up there and not wanting to have to deal with two enemies at once while in an Existential crisis I agreed, and this is how the Federation ended and I became a "Satellite" under one of the Dormant Empire thingies and had to agree to destroy any of the robots I still had left:
Alas, they weren't that much help, so I jumped back into the portal system, destroyed the remaining few fleets and finally fucked up their portal Saving the galaxy, and am in the process of colonizing the areas they had razed down and building up my Fleet strength and Tech to take on the Awakened Fallen Empires:
They went on to instead exterminate some other suckers first: