So, uh, the other day I made a post about the single player campaign I just started, my first time playing on Starburst, and being immediately sandwiched between two hostile federations when I just wanted to play as friendly, knowledge-seeking diplomats.
For those of you interested, by the way, I managed to keep them at a standstill with my starbase and then narrowly reclaimed the one system they took to eke out a true status-quo end to the war. However, with my extraordinary military buildup finally paying dividends, the next war we fight will be the LAST war they fight.
Anyway, not the point of this post. I traded for communications with an empire I had met on the opposite side of the galaxy (some random anomaly put me in contact with the "most delicious race in the galaxy" or something like that) because I was trying to get the GC to form.
Lo and behold, but one of the three empires I get communication with is... literally me. I mean literally an exact copy of my empire. I've never seen this before. Same empire name, same species, same homeworld and star, same traits and ethics, and what have you. Just an exact clone of my empire on the opposite side of the galaxy. Is this a bug? It seems like this shouldn't be possible. But anyways...
I think we'll be best friends :D
And to whatever redditor made the ancient post I found that said that "Starburst led to some interesting games," you weren't kidding!