Yeah, no more playing Galactic Civ II's campaign.
Any mission where the Dread Lords are present on the map from the beginning is an exercise in pure frustration. They're so far ahead of you that it takes you half the game (hours of work) to get to the point you can even resist their attacks, and by that point they're too numerous to ever be defeated (the only way to beat them is through superior numbers).
Also, I think the missions are borked because of version upgrades. The game material states that Dread Lords do not conquer planets, and if that were true, the campaign might be doable. Except they conquer planets all the damned time, which I think was an ability they got in a later expansion pack which, of course, got retroactively applied to all previous missions.
I like the game because its sandbox missions are fun as hell, but their campaign designers were morons by the looks of it.