BUG - Pirate battles between AIs causing Multiplayer to lock

I was playing Galactic Civilizations IV multi-player with a friend the past several days and we hardly get a few turns through when we end our turn and it hangs on a different race. After looking at the debug file afterwards(debug at bottom of message), it was observed that 'said'-race was in a battle with pirates.

To resolve this for that turn, one of the multi-player has to leave and then it'll get back to (my) turn for me to save the game, and reload it. This is extremely inconvenient.

To prove this theory, minor races were set to none and we got through ~20 turns before a race incountered pirates again and locked up the game.

Is there a way to disable pirates completely? Maybe having no anomalies and no minor races? However this will probably also happen when 2 AI clans go to war with each other too later in the game.

Debug file snippet below. Note that the game was locked up until the other player disconnected (INVALID SOCKET ID).

Debug Message: AddBattle: ticket 3 Consuming random value 507726705 and seeding the battleData.randStream
Debug Message: CBattleSystem::AddBattle ticket 3 attackerID 8979 (Drengin Empire Drengia Fleet I) defenderID 1057299 (Pirates Raphael Fleet II)
Debug Message: CBattleSystem:isplayBattleResults Battle [Seed 507726705] Ticket 3 [Attacking Fleet 8979] [Defending Fleet 1057299] tick 38878
Debug Message: FirstContact::Send playerIndex: 2 playerIndex: 8 turn encountered: 16 should skip conversation: 1
Debug Message: Member status for user 000...a25 (NetID 3588447708) (isLocalPlayer: 0) is now Left
Debug Message: Attempted to close a connection with a Socket ID that is invalid. RemoteUserId=[000...a25] SocketId=[INVALID SOCKET ID!]
Debug Message: MPAdapter::CloseP2PSessionAndRemovePlayer begin 3588447708
Debug Message: MPAdapter::CloseP2PSessionAndRemovePlayer m_OpenP2PSessions removing 3588447708
Debug Message: CloseP2PSessionWithUser NetID 3588447708
Debug Message: CPlayerEvent_ConvertToAI netIDRemote 3588447708 playerID 3
Debug Message: Popup Manager Update: Unhiding MessageBoxWnd
Debug Message: CloseP2PSessionWithUser NetID 3588447708
Debug Message: CBattleSystem::ApplyBattleResults. ticket 3, Attacking Fleet: 8979, Defending Fleet: 1057299 Victor: DebugMessage: PlanetImprovementContextList setting size 360 x 0
DebugMessage: PlanetImprovementContextList setting size 360 x 0
DebugMessage: PlanetImprovementContextList setting size 360 x 0
DebugMessage: PlanetImprovementContextList setting size 360 x 0
DebugMessage: PlanetImprovementContextList setting size 360 x 0
DebugMessage: PlanetImprovementContextList setting size 360 x 0
Defender Defeated Survivors: 1

If someone can look into this or suggest a solution that'd be greatly appreciated! Otherwise I just don't think I can play multi-player anymore until this bug is fixed