In Sword of the Stars some scenarios require you to colonise certain systems.The only solution is to fire the council altogether.
Due to a bug in Crusader Kings II's Conclave Downloadable Content, Player Characters ruling nomadic realms sometimes end up in a Catch-22 Dilemma where the members of their realm council dislike them because they want more land, then disagree with granting vassal khans (usually including themselves) more land, because they dislike the PC due to wanting more land.This means the game literally has no win conditions anymore and becomes a giant sandbox.
Under the advanced settings when creating a new game, you can disable any of the game's multiple win conditions - you can even disable all of them, leaving only Score Victory (whoever has the most points when the turn limit runs out).