Enemy surrender... planets vanished

I was enjoying a lengthy play. Medium sized galaxy, I dominated 3 clusters (out of about 10). Playing slowest pacing settings. 

• Was trying to conquer the anteater enemy. He had no starbases at all and didn't have much of a defense or offense. But as I was closing in to start conquering his planets, he gives up and gifts all his planets to his buddy, the Arceans. I take a quick look and decide to declare war on him too as he's in 2 of my 3 clusters. Then I go to resume the invasion and notice all his planets are completely gone, reduced to dead planets. One was a class 36 next to a class 32. 
• Would like to be able to speed up move animations. The options are either a slow animation or no animation at all. I'd like something in between. 
• Even on slowest pacing options, the tech doesn't take long before you are researching everything in 3 turns or less (almost at large hulls). 
• Enemy spawns for pirates and creatures -- just keep spawning almost forever. Cleaning them up after taking out the shipyard takes a very long time. And seems to be hurting performance. I played a game with them turned off and turns didn't take nearly as long to resolve. Figure if they are capped and can evolve over time that could be a performance benefit. 
• Open borders and scouting aren't really well communicated. Nobody seems to respect boundaries and the diplomacy penalty doesn't seem to matter. I can spot info in diplomacy but no real sense that things are becoming a problem. Especially later when you need armed or escorted explorers to clear out defended anomalies. But everyone is doing it. 
• Auto explorers for probes could be smarter. They tend to run into enemies and ignore them instead of keeping a safe distance. Wish there was a way to mark the map for dangerous spots. When a ship dies you get a brief marker, but it goes away after a turn or two. 
• Enemy seems to like to send off lots of single ships instead of stacks. Makes micro really challenging having to constantly have fleets feeding off them for levels/experience. 
• Commander ship upgrades are way too overpowered. Don't even have large ships yet and managed to have single ships dishing out 100 or more damage with 200+ hp each just from running around and scouting. They are able to take out red anomalies. 
• Speaking of red anomalies, watched an enemy fleet destroy one but I was able to research it. Yet when I took one out, I was already researching it. 
• Encountered a yellow anomaly, didn't quite kill the enemies, but then I couldn't attack it after that because it said someone was already researching it. So it just stayed that forever, even after quitting to desktop. So the state got serialized.
• The MBS? (furry cute creatures) seem to absolutely steam roll everyone by a huge factor in the few games I've played big enough to house one of each civ. His score was 20k, where 2nd (Iconians) with 3.5k, and 3rd (me) 3k. I think they need to be nerfed. 
  
  

I can deal with bugs and am enjoying this, but having my victim's core planets instantly disappear at surrender while leaving the colonies gifted to another player makes me not want to play it. Looking forward to the next set of patches.