Do you mean 1 AI or all the AI combined have 40 planets? I haven't played on beginner but that sounds buggy regardless of how inexperienced you are. On normal they seem to play at a fairly slow pace. Hard to believe 1 AI could be that far ahead of you, but it's hard to believe you only have 5 colonies after over a 100 turns. Have you ever played before? 

At this stage of the beta they seem to mainly research military and they are always broke, regardless of level. You need to colonize faster and if you have some credits you can buy all of the AI ships fairly cheap. That will fix your power level but I would start another game (try normal) and see if you can stay even with the AI on colonies 

Well, 40 for 5 races is about 8 vs your 5 that's not so bad if you had a bad starting location, but still sounds like a bug for the beginner level.

Franco...LOL each AI had 40 plus planets and 140 plus ships each!

All of them were well over 200k power

stephen3

without any specifics, about start-up settings/the actual current turn/initial generated map/usage of custom ship designs/modded files/etc..., it is very hard to make any statement about whether there is a problem with the AI level and/or compare it to the game play results of another player.

What i normally do is make a save in the first turn before i do anything, and make (and keep) a save at regular intervals (or when something weird happens). This can help in tracking down any problems. If you have got a first turn save and your current save then post links to those here. With those someone (SD or a forum member) can take a look at the problem, by loading the saves, or even try to replay them.

Since everything is stored in the save file, you do not have to upload any modded files/ship designs.

I'm curious as to why you only have 5 planets after 100 turns?  Were there not very many habitable ones nearby?

also helps turning up the galaxy size, habbitable planet, and extreme planets frequency lol