I remember min/maxing in every single player game that has ever existed when I was 14 and thinking I was amazing.

Then I realized I was cheating myself by not restraining myself. 

So now I just min/max in MMORPG's where I can kill you and take all your stuff and feel good about myself as I repeat the equivalent of taking candy from a baby!

Maybe you are just too intelligent.

You have several choices to make the game harder.

1. Try smaller maps. You wont be able to use the same tactics to win as you do on bigger maps.

2. Mod the ai to increase their bonus stats. I think its also possible to change what/how the ai builds ships.

3. Play the bigger maps with more and more ai until you find a challenge.

4. Play against human players.

Did we really need three threads on this topic?

You have figured out how to game a fairly narrow set of circumstances that has been mentioned previously by several people. Now, go play with different settings, like Seilore.

100+ Colonies by turn 40?

Inquiring minds from enslavers would like to know the state of your military. It's not like that they will descend upon you for free slaves. Don't worry. We're just doing scholarly research. Would you be kind to inform us, please?

Looking into his other threads... he is posting the same complaint over and over. He's also playing with the same settings over and over, all while it is already known that the sum of some settings are leading to a default win. So I guess he needs the attention otherwise he wouldn't create like 20 threads complaining basically about the same problem. It won't get fixed any faster that way.

I am rather doubtful he can manage 100 colonies by turn 40. He would run out of money and population rather quickly. I would like to see some proof of his game play and the proof he is playing on Godlike.

 Furthermore it takes time to build a shipyard or rush it. In any case even at TEN Planets with RUSHED shipyards you would not have the cash to rush colony ships. Also Ben lV would take at least 20 planets to colonize to get.

Id like to see him play his game on RARE/RARE hab planetary settings. Come back with a lets play utub or pics. Personally I think he is trolling.

One last note. He is also playing a custom race since no base race has Patriotic anymore. I suggest he try to 'win' the game all the way through on say, the Iconians and try the same thing on 'Godlike'.

If he indeed is doing it somehow, I would suggest you create a support ticket to Stardock outlining the exploits you're using to make the game that easy for you so they can fix the issue and make the game harder for you and more fun.   In the outline I would include all your map settings and steps you're taking to get 100 planets by turn 40 so it can be reproduced.

I was just about to say it how do you get that many colony ships thought the pirate screens lol.

Even if he's using very specific settings and a carefully built custom race, he still has a point. Once again, there's never a good reason NOT to settle another colony. Even if you have 0% morale from LEP, the penalties aren't harsh enough to counter the benefits of the extra planets; the tiny maintenance score means that you barely need to use money, so if you have an alternative means of getting research you can pour everything into manufacturing and churn out colony ships every turn from around turn 5.

Presently, bigger is always better; this is simplistic and means the optimal strategy early on is always spamming as many colony ships as possible. Colonies are instantly self-supporting, and it takes ages for them to build themselves into a position to lose money. Once you have any drive techs, pirates stop being an issue since they only move 2 spaces, so unless you're really unlucky colony ships can simply outrun them. 

We need mechanics in place to make expansion more of a trade-off - either a maintenance increase to put you at a genuine risk of bankruptcy, or else a food mechanic which puts you at risk of losing population when a colony can't support itself.

Change your galaxy type to spread out the planets and have few habitable planets and more extreme planets relatively speaking. Then your strategy doesn't work. In a galaxy with abundant habitable planets, this is definitely the way to go. In a game where you might have to research just to be able to discover the next habitable planet, not so much. 

I have the most fun on insane size (although it does get quite slow late game) maps with sparse planets. This also makes non-economic starbases actually meaningful in terms of extending fleet range and influence. 

The game is easy on normal and that is fine by me. I only play on normal because as dumb as the AI may be, it is basically playing by the rules. I have no interest in attempting to beat an AI that is getting huge cheats and bonuses. I have played on higher levels and won but it was work and not fun.

I enjoy playing as a casual distraction and the building aspect of the game. I am not looking for some kind of intense challenge. I want it to be easy and I want to win every time. On big maps, I usually quit the game around T 150-200 when I am so far ahead the issue in not in doubt. On smaller maps I will end it with influence or diplomacy. Sometimes I start a game just to fool around with the ship designer.

Incidentally, I am currently playing an Insane map with 50 factions and all abundant. The game is playing smoothly at turn 50 and I am 3X power over the 2 factions I have met. The turns take maybe 30 seconds to a minute but I only have 8 ram. I am going to press on with this game just to see if I have any problems like some have complained about.

Actually I consider a 50 faction game a little silly. The game was designed to allow the very best systems to handle 100 factions but imo it was never intended for anyone to actually play such a ridiculous game on a regular basis. 

This is a preposterous thing to say, frankly. If it supports it as part of the base game's settings, you can't then turn around and say 'oh, well, it was never meant to be played like that' - actually, yes it was. It's in the brief. It is, in fact, a feature. That's why the setting exists - it wasn't accidentally dropped in when a coder's hand slipped. Sure, if we're modding the game to expand the number of stars or planets we can't complain about it being unbalanced, but setting the game to maximum everything is NOT modding. Nor is adding in 50+ factions to a game; the game supports 128 players and allows custom factions. It blatantly WAS intended to do so, since it's in the design spec; in fact, it's one of the things which makes GC3 stand out from the many other space 4X games out there.

Just because most people prefer to play on medium with 4-5 empires, doesn't mean we should ignore balance issues that crop up on higher settings, or hand-wave them away as unimportant. If you advertise the game as supporting 128 players on the largest maps ever included in a 4X game, some people are going to buy the game specifically because of that; you don't get to say 'oh, it can do it, it just breaks almost immediately if you use the ability to do so'. That's really just saying 'well, I don't care if the game doesn't work right on any settings other than the ones I like to play on'.

Now, I get that Stardock want to  concentrate the earliest patches on optimizing the settings that are going to see the most use. That's fine. I'm patient (hence why I want to play an epic-length game with a vast map and hundreds of enemies), and I can wait for SD to get round to looking at the more esoteric settings later. But I'm sick of the number of times I've read legitimate issues here being dismissed by other posters saying 'oh, well, if you're going to play with those settings you should expect the game to break'. No, you shouldn't. Unless you've delved into the code and screwed around with it, you should expect the game to work, full stop. It shouldn't become too easy because you have 50 planets per player compared to 5. LEP shouldn't effectively break on higher settings. The AI shouldn't quit colonizing on abundant settings because it can't handle  owning over 80 planets. These things will need to be addressed in time. There's some clear issues with how the game scales, and feedback from the crazies who play on the megamaps is just as valuable as those from other settings.

Let's quit judging some settings to be 'silly' or 'not important' because they're not an exact match for our own preferences.