Just wanted to point out if you are allied with another race, and you attack an enemy territory, sometimes your ally will help you attack by sending military units to that battle.

It is quite cool to see both you and your allys units attack an enemy in the same battle.

I haven't been lucky enough to have this happen yet, but I've been doing some experimenting with alliances and I notice that it's very easy to "cheese" alliances, even on you first turn. It's possible to have a full alliance (all pacts including Technology AND Victory) on turn 1 with another race if you exploit saving, restarting the game and reloading. This won't work with all races, but here's the method: use the Chat feature to send another race Praise then use the Diplomacy feature to propose a Non-aggression pact. If they accept, then they can be exploited. All you would have to do is save the game after they accept a pact, exit, and reload the save and repeat the process until you get all the way to Victory pact. The ideal order would be Non-aggression > Research > Intelligence > Military (cycle through Non-aggression to get this) > Victory. I wouldn't recommend doing this because having a Technology pact makes the game much easier.

Edit: Now I'm not sure if using Praise actually guarantees they'll accept a pact or maybe anything at all. Sometimes they will accept a pact without Praise (or any other chat interaction) or they won't accept even if you do Praise them. I have noticed that loading a save from a different scenario and the reloading the current scenario can change the outcome. It's tricky and I don't understand it completely, but it still seems to be doable (all pacts on turn 1 with another race).

Edit2: Praise seems to be more effective on some races than others (for example, it's always effective when Humans praise the Maug) but other interactions seem to be more effective before you propose a Non-aggression pact for other races. I could only get the Cyth to agree to a Non-aggression pact by sending them a Complaint first. One other thing worth noting is that you can only have one Victory pact active in a game: you don't have the option to make another after another race accepts.

You gotta becareful when you save/quit/restart. If you do it wrong, the game will actually double the AIs' stuff when you reload the save. Gotta use the save option it gives you when you quit the game. (At least the original version did this GOG might've removed it)