Quick background: Long time fan of 4x games but have only played them very causally. Played GalCiv 1 and 2 but only at easy and normal and not all that much. I play MMOs and RTS more competitively and am a pretty serious min-maxer in them.

I bought Gal Civ 3 last weekend and played two games on easy after one level of the tutorial. Lost the 1st and won the 2nd culturally. I vaguely noticed that there was some thing to control global and planetary production but I decided to just ignore it the first go around. I figured I'd need to figure out how to be more efficient at harder difficulties but I was probably ok on easy to just get a feel for technology and units and some other stuff.

I come in this week and noticed a patch but I don't read the notes. I don't know enough about the game to really know what they'd mean anyway. Try another easy game. See some new options under planetary governors so I decide I'll try to specialize my planets this time. I use the governors to automate building on my planets and choose to focus on manufacturing on my home. I pick a few worlds with bonuses to make 2 research and 2 wealth worlds alongside my 3 or 4 manufacturing worlds on a small galaxy. This goes ok until the AI starts circling around my planets with fleets and fleets of ships constantly. Ok... lesson learned I shouldn't ignore military completely. I try another game, similar strategy except I start cranking out enough ships to keep the AI off my back. I cannot keep my economy afloat. The AI has TONS of ships roaming space and I'm dead broke trying to keep some resistance up on my planets. My production is pretty good so I pepper the universe with starbases to try and boost economy and research but without much luck. Decide to figure out the sliders but putting it up in favor of wealth so I'm not losing 30 credits/week just puts my production at a glacial pace.... Hmmmm ok decide to read up on any guides to figure out what I'm doing wrong. How does the AI have SO many ships and still able to research/produce? I expect that my weaksauce attempts to be efficient should be lacking at higher difficulties but 3 games I can't win on easy now.

I spend hours on these forums and trying to watch YouTube videos and find that all the info is either really really basic (here's how to build a starbase!) or here everyone's debating the removal of the planetary sliders. I haven't played enough to be able to weigh in on the changes but I feel like the metagame is so well known to players of this (or maybe other 4x games) that everyone who plays it has an understanding of it... and I'm not getting it. There not much info to give some general strategy. Tile adjacencies, cool that makes sense but should I be building more farms? Should the auto-planet governors be good enough to do take care of my planets and give me a good example on easier difficulties? Are they useless and my planets suck? By not messing with my spending sliders early in the game is that what's wrong? I don't mind having the dig and try to improve to beat higher difficulties... but I can't seem to figure out easy as a new player all of a sudden.