Yes.....and it's easy....you get them to invite the UFP into their Alliance and then you can bring them into the UFP over time......

Nah I've found in my current game I can't enter an alliance with the tellerites because the denobluians are too far away for them to consider an alliance. They are sat there, two systems away, but because I don't have a direct boarder I just have to watch them get murdered. :/

Well, not as murdered as badly as the romulans tend to get, they get dumpstered in every one of my games so far! Ha ha. But yeah the AI struggles to ever even found the Federation what with them all all the federation founders and alliance builders being a bunch of democratic crusader crazy people! They start more wars then the Klingons!

I wonder if there could be some sneaky AI code put in to make federation founders and so on always love each other, no matter the distance, to try and encourage them to hug box every relevant game. If nothing else as the main threat to a player who isn't playing the Feds.

I wonder if I play in the delta or gamma quadrant maps, if the Federation it's self is an endgame crisis....

It's kind of intentional that they don't overwhelmingly love each other, since the show is explicit in showing how close they all were to war at various point.

We are looking at reducing the distance malus though. By a few percentage points.