So what happened is I was looking for a built in leftist-enough faction to play and zeroed in on 'rational consensus.' And one of them critters are called the Lacertan Techno-Protectorate. And they sounded cool. The race achieved FTL at the same time they caught the Children of Men disease and it's a race to trans-alien-ism before your population dies out.
Well my population died out! And I managed to (20 months late) get the (dangerous) technology that lets you have Elon Hype AI run shit (therefore having the capacity to house my backed-up population on material world artificial bodies). But I never figured out how to build mechanical bodies so my population of Ghosts in the Shells never got above tiny! And the instant I found another faction next to me I got absolutely stomped!
So then I rerolled the exact same build and made the galaxy bigger. 
also I was playing on 'ensign' difficulty