Recently, I played a funny game : at the beginning, I had realised that an imperial system had a rather high rebel loyalty. I was playing rebel, and I had a three ship doing nothing. So I sent them, and as I expected the empire had like 4 troops and no shield. So I bombed them, and sursprise ! The whole system rallied me. Rather nice, isn't it ? Later in the game (about day 110) I sent four guys on a diplomatic mission, which succeded adminrably, and the result was that an imperial planet became neutral while two planet joined me. The bad thing is that the game crashed about 50 days later