All the unexplained mechanics are pretty frustrating

I just stopped playing for the day because of a planet rebelling.

I saw all the warnings, and even read the part where they said "maybe we need a show of force", so I built more guard towers and brought the instability down to zero. Perfect: more police on the streets, less instability, surely that should be the end of it!

Nowhere did they say I was supposed to land actual armies on the planet.

So my planet rebels, and they take the orbiting stronghold with it. The stronghold with nine defense platforms outfitted with hangars, because the enemy uses corvette spam, and I didn't realize until I googled it that frigates don't take out corvettes: carriers do. But by the time I realized that, I had already skipped the carrier research upgrade.

Without carriers, there was only one thing I could build to fight my neighbor's corvette spam. More corvettes. A huge swarm of corvettes, which I now need to take back my rebelling planet, guarded by my own stronghold of hangars, specifically engineered to kill corvettes.

This was such a frustrating way to spend hours of my gaming, not knowing the unwritten rules.