Yes, this is sad and true. I have experienced this myself before.

On NORMAL difficulty the ai is at the same lvl as you and is limited by the fog of war. 

On any difficulty ABOVE normal the ai does NOT have Fog of War, They can see YOU and all resources and all habitable planets. It is rather annoying. I was hoping Stardock can keep the FOW for Gifted or the next tier up.

 You are correct. What I was stating is exactly working as intended. I had read that the Devs were going to make it that the next steps up above Normal and the ai would be subject to FOW. 

I am not sure that is the case yet. 

I really don't understand what the big deal is.

I couldn't care less how the computer opponents achieve their behaviour, as long as it provides a good experience for me. In fact, I would even argue that the AI should use even more information about me and the galaxy, that I as a human player are not able to get. As long as the resulting behaviour enhances my fun, I'm all for it.

If you want fair sportsmanship you should use multiplayer against humans.

Thanks for the update.  I thought I heard that general FOW was in effect on all levels of GC3, and it does seem that way in my games, but I wasn't sure enough to respond to the thread.

Interesting point on performance considerations as well as game mechanics.  I hadn't thought of that, but it does make a lot of sense.  Good job on trimming the FOW reveal down to the present status.  Thinking about it as a performance issue makes that gain somewhat impressive.

When people ask the repeated question about the differences between GC2 and GC3, this should be added to the list.

So you are actually saying that the human player is cheating? LOL is hard to make everybody happy

There's a difference between what you can do with a 64-bit engine, and what you can do with a 64-bit engine on the current average hardware. For example, you can address up to 16 Exabytes of RAM with a 64-bit engine. That's about a billion times as much as you'll find in any modern home computer, and several hundred million times as much as you'd find in a modern super computer. 

SD have a set of 'minimum specs' that are probably determined by the marketing department as the average for their target market. They need to try and make the game so that performance on those minimum specs remains reasonable. These specs can rise over time - I doubt they'll be worrying too much about trying to make the game run on a 2010 Macbook Pro in 2020 - but mean that no, they cannot really make as much use of the engine as they might want to (right now). The game already struggles with very large maps on under 32GB of RAM; keeping 80 copies of that map with different vision saves would basically make the game unplayable on any modern system that might be called upon to play it.

Personally, I`d prefer to hear from the man who knows, the Dev, himself, not those who seem to think they must talk for him  like in some cult. Thankyou.