Hello Aldebaran and welcome to the community! It's great you and your friends like to play multiplayer.
To let you get the best help, would you please post screenshot of the error message? Maybe it's something about special characters like ´`' …
I remember you ranting on that before, but I cannot find your post (I guess it was just a screenshot, no word 'Silk Road'). Was it, that the Team Bonus should have another name than the Civilization Bonus?
By playing a release candidate of Release 28 (a6403, 4 Dec 25) I could not verify this behaviour. I played last man standing matches each as han, one time against a Macedonian and another time against a Germanic opponent. After surrending I could see they were able to build palisades as well.
I remember having a similar feature (stance build & gather) in Rise of Nations which I deactivated very soon. Sending units to a rally point to easily get back to them, just to see few moments later, that there are no units, drove me crazy. Okay, they weren't idle and did some stuff, but they weren't really available.