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Every game I play seems to follow the same path in terms of my relations with the Ancient Guardians (I play standard empire in classic mode with all story options enabled).

The Ancient Guardians invariably have their home system located close to mine (so I am guaranteed to meet them early and hear their message, I get why this is the case) however, they also begin with a number of mining stations in the surrounding systems and these mining stations, more often than not, end up violating my territory as I expand my empire.

This violation ends up being an unending source of tension between my empire and the Ancient Guardians and after a time, my ships (regardless of if attacks of opportunity are enabled or not) will eventually become perturbed enough where they begin firing on these station and the military ships patrolling and refueling at them. Understandably this pattern of behavior soon leads the Guardians to despise me and in every game I play the Guardians end up declaring war on me and obliterating my empire with their massive tech advantage.

I find this to be a rather frustrating state of affairs and the fact that I am not able to negotiate for these offending bases only exacerbates the issue. I have to ask; is this working as intended? If so, I think it needs a serious looking at, because being at war with the Ancient Guardians early in the game for reasons far beyond your control is no fun at all.

I hope this issue can be looked at and resolved in a future patch. Has anyone else noticed this problem in their games?

They start firing of their own initiative? What kind of automation do you run related to war and attacks?

^
This. I've never seen that before. Sounds...difficult.

I control attacks manually through fleet postures. These autonomous transgressions are carried out by individual ships not attached to any fleets.

I don't think I've ever played a game where anything remotely like this has ever happened so your claim that every one of your games run into this problem is perplexing. It must be something about the way you're playing because I don't recall ever hearing about anyone with the same problem.

AI usually uses lone ships and strikeforces to do anything without even asking the player. My boskaran fleet annihilated 5 planets before im noticed it because reputation was diabolic suddenly. AI automation disregarded orders to refuel and bombarded planets without asking questions. It happens with other races too but boskarans are pain on the auto-fleet management.

This happens in every game I've ever played when the Guardians are near enough for their stations to intrude on my territory. The only way I've managed to prevent it is to put the attack enemy automation on suggestion or manual, but if I'm a race the Guardians hate, insectoids, then it's always a lost cause and I'll have to expect them to attack at some point.

If it's an issue caused by having foreign mines in your territory, try giving them mining rights. This effectively makes the mines legal (which should remove the 'disputed bases' relationship modifier from your race, improving what your faction thinks of theirs, not that you can see the modifiers on your own faction's opinions), rather than an intrusion into your territory, and I suspect that the automation routines will no longer consider such mines to be valid targets (though it may still do so if your faction hates theirs enough, and the computer may suggest that you revoke the mining rights or, if you allow it control over diplomatic relations, revoke those rights itself, if your faction has a particularly low opinion, especially coupled with a high aggression).

In a case like this, I would generally try to obtain any of the concessions that improve relations to cause the computer to stop sending out raiders. Get free trade agreements, figure out how to encourage trade between your empire and theirs, legalize their mining stations within your territory (and perhaps try to obtain mining rights within theirs), give them military refueling rights so you don't have "their ships are in our space! Kill them!" events. Alternatively, wipe them out. The computer is less likely to send attacks against empires that it thinks you like, and you can see which empires it thinks you like by going to the diplomacy menu and clicking through the empires. The opinions of all the empires, including your own, towards the selected empire will be displayed next to the name of the empire holding this opinion (the opinions range from furious to pleased, and will be blank if the empires haven't made contact with one another yet; this is the same area where you can see the official relations status - red for war, orange for trade sanctions, yellow for subjugation, green for free trade agreements, blue for alliances, and the flags indicating mining or refueling rights). More aggressive and more reckless species seem more likely to make these kinds of attacks, and increasing the game aggression setting also makes these kinds of raids more likely.

Also in addition to mining rights give the guardians refueling rights so your empire won't be angry at their ships patrolling their mines...

Lonnie Courtney Clay