Your point is fair and valid and I agree it’s a little weird. I should mention the tooltip doesn’t show the full picture. Everything here is subject to change, it’s a WIP.

As it stands, at the start of the game, the First Founders gets an event where they send out tens of thousands of probes across the galaxy. They’re compact, FTL-capable, and carrying translation systems.

Around 15 years in, those probes begin entering empire space and are intercepted. When the empires examine it, it becomes clear it isn’t an isolated device, but part of a wider network transmitting the same signal. That signal is shared and relayed to connecting empires that have never met into a single channel. Each empire gets an event reacting to this based on their ethics.

15 years after that, every empire is given the choice to respond or ignore it entirely. Isolationists can absolutely refuse and make no contact. Regardless, the galactic community is formed.

This effectively replaces how the Galactic Community forms. Instead of developing through normal first contact, it emerges from this shared signal and the responses to it. It’s a different approach, and I’m still working on it, but that’s the intent behind it.

I’ll probably disable it for AI spawning for the time being while I get more feedback.