Colonizing planets prevents the end of a war?

[Continuous Mike]

I attempted to claim all the planets in a dude's empire and went out and took over everything I could, but he was in the process of colonizing 2 planets already. I'm not allowed to land armies or do anything but bombard them when they're not colonized yet. I tried to bombard them for a few years but i was forced to take a status quo because the exhaustion crept up, and they refused to give me claimed planets because i wasn't occupying their uncolonized planets. It would have been positive if I could just land armies and take out an upcoming colony

Can AI just prevent extermination entirely by colonizing right before you wipe them out, stalling their destruction indefinitely? If that's the case, that's really dumb and hilarious for online play

[Elitewrecker PT]

Bombing an in-development colony will eventually stop the colonizing process.
Status quo gives you claimed occupied systems though, so at most you didn't receive two systems if those ones being colonized were claimed.

[Continuous Mike]

yeah, there were two systems and three planets i wanted. i occupied one planet in a system, but the colonozing planet prevented me from being able to negotiate for that entire system, making me lose the planet i conquered. It's annoying how i can't just murder an inferior planet and instead have to rely on bombardment for years stopping me from closing out a fight. I have fanatic purifiers at my border, and i wanted to deal with these guys before i have to deal with them. hopefully they'll be too weak to bother me for a long time, but they did get their one planet that i occupied back that still has 32 pops on it, so they can still expand

[Continuous Mike]

just happened again, this time on the fanatic purifiers. They have a single planet left that's in the process of being colonized, and despite the planet having 100% devastation and being bombarded from my entire federation and some other random people, we can't finish the war because colonizing planets have special protection for no reason

this is really annoying and just delays the game a lot

[Elitewrecker PT]

Don't look at the devastation, look at the colonization progress, the bombing will decrease the progress. The farther along it was, the longer it takes to stop it, it might even be quicker to let them finish and then invade than bombing.

[Hobo Humpin Slobo]

It's one form of a known bug at least up to 2.3.1.

Read the patch notes regarding 2.3.2 beta: 1st bullet point under BUGFIXES.