On a roll here, playing normal difficulty and the Drengin declare war pretty early (I am still building tiny ships, but building a LOT of them (yeah! zero maint!). Apparently the Drengin only had like 5 fighting ships when they declared, sent them in to harass. I killed them all and Drengin surrendered.
Do I need to set it to 'Kill All'? Done tha before in other games and it can be quite tedious as I've had AI run away and hide on me in other gamess (VERY annoying!), so I prefer to not set that, but this is definitely on the other side of the scale. And I wasn't even done setting up to take the fight into their space yet... <sigh>