Backing this up, they really need to do something about the Academy.. it's no fun playing with a "cheater" on the same game, and this "cheater" just happened to be the game AI. Given enough time we can eliminate them in a way but they will keep spawning unlimited ships to take back their system. This is just... wrong and unbalanced. Might have to give the DLC a thumb down review because of this. And seems like it's already FULL of negative reviews. The devs are either very distracted or they didn't care about the game enough to ignore those reviews. This hinted the future of this game. A bad one.

Somebody should write a mod that makes the Academy Embassy improvement also set your status with the Academy to peaceful by default, so that none of their fleets will siege or attack you unless you've directly antagonized them (or not contributed). That keeps them as an early early game terror if you spawn next to them (appropriate from a flavor standpoint, first contact with an uber-tech organization), yet also gives unlucky start spawn players a method to get the Academy fleets off them with relative ease by prioritizing researching/building the Embassy.

Academy siege  4 of 6 my systems ( being neutral) and i cant do anything about that. 

Thanks god that its happends in my very first game and now i can refund shitgame with bug over two years.

Farewell.

TExz wrote:

Academy siege  4 of 6 my systems ( being neutral) and i cant do anything about that. 

Thanks god that its happends in my very first game and now i can refund shitgame with bug over two years.

Farewell.

Just disable the Awakening DLC, as that's the DLC where the Academy became a faction and started doing that sort of thing. Or in my case, just never buy it. ES2 is a really fun game, but best played without the last two DLC.

You can simply lower the academy difficulty level in game options, when starting new game. Not sure, why so many people don't get it.

New player here; just stumbled upon the problem and by the looks of it, the Academy has been an absolute terror for quite some time now.

An Academy colony ship besieged my Vaulter Capital around Turn 20. Having no diplomatic channels with them, I destroyed the colony ship, was addressed a stern message threatening with reparations... and a couple of turns later, got obliterated by a vengeful Academy fleet.

Reloaded, decided to leave the colony ship be, hoping that at some point it would get bored and drift away...but the damned thing essentially crippled my budding empire so much that by Turn 50 I could barely resist the pressure from the neighboring Nakalim and Umbral Choir...

And I was playing on Easy!

Didn't know there was a special difficulty slider for the Academy before reading this thread, will try it for my next game. Hopefully, my mighty space empire won't get humiliated by a single benevolent AI faction's civilian ship :)