I am also a long time fan of Galciv games and i recently tarted playing Galciv 3 last couple of months.

I have observed a couple of things why the AI is not performing well, but the main one by far is ship range. I do not recall ship range being such a big issue in Galciv2 like it is in Galciv 3? Range is a good game aspect, but can we really expect an AI to understand it as well as the player?

The other big AI weakness is targeting priority..... because of these new ship categories - capital, assault, guard etc..... and of course Escort is the one players can exploit in a big way against the AI. In Galciv2 it was much harder to manipulate the targeting priority of the AI.... it will never attack the low weapon, heavily defended ship first.... your high defense ship has to have a high attack as well to draw fire away from low defense ships.... and those low defensive ships have to have their attack rating limited or else they will start drawing fire.

Ultimately I think combat in Galciv2 was far more AI friendly.

Apart from that, i find i do really enjoy Galciv3

Your economic ideas are somewhat problematic.

Population is indeed powerful, a high raw output is far superior to just stacking up more and more production, but skipping specialized worlds is highly inefficient.  It's quite feasible to get 100+ raw manufacturing on a death furnace world, but if you have 100+ raw manufacturing, just a single structure will give you far more research or money than you can get from producing it with manufacturing.

A couple games back, I had a 600+ manufacturing world.  This world was horribly inefficient, the tile layout was deplorable and my placement of structures non optimal.  I had my slave pit and death furnace by themselves, adjacent to each other.  I could have had massively more.  When I started producing research, I was only making 200, less than a third of my production.  My production, on the other hand, was quite large for a research world, but you can easily top out a thousand income on the right planet with the right selection, you will never make anywhere near that much using population and manufacturing.  A high raw production is very agreeable, but there's no substitution for having several hundred percent in modifiers on top of that raw production.  Producing research and money is exceedingly inefficient.

For your research criticism, might I suggest you slow it down?  There's a significant range to the research setting, and it's easily modified if very slow just isn't slow enough.

Threads like this make me think I'm not even playing the same game as everyone else.

UI:

On the UI suggestion you had for terraforming, do keep in mind that every terraforming technology has different placement rules. The higher level ones can be used on a larger selection of tiles than the lower tech ones. On some high quality planets the two lowest tech terraforming usually can't be used at all because all valid tiles are already unlocked. So implementing the 1-click building you propose would also have to have a check in place to prevent wasting say a terraforming that can happen on any tile on the planet when one of the really wimpy ones would work.

As for the designs, dear god I would love the option to disable every ship design every game. I do NOT want the game to save my designs from game to game, and I hate wasting all the time in the designer making 10-40 ships obsolete every time I invent a new technology. I'm with you 100% on this one.

On the mass upgrade feature, I am ambivalent. If it works for you great. For me, the cost to upgrade is so high that I think I've only used upgrade in less than 1/10 of my games simply because I can never afford to do it. A mass upgrade would be completely wasted on me unless the cost was reduced by one or two orders of magnitude at the same time.

Races:

On the race traits, your results are clearly different than mine. For me the production wheel does nothing but bankrupt me. Back when it was the default setting and coercive didn't exist, we all just got the production wheel for free, other players had posted detailed instructions on how to use it, some of them turn-by-turn instructions. I would follow them and it never worked out well for me. Rapidly I'd go bankrupt and the game then forces the wheel on every planet to 100% money and disables changing it until you're not bankrupt anymore, which just means I can't build anything anywhere and am still bankrupt, so all I can do is move existing ships and end my turn until someone kills me. Some games I would lose without ever meeting an AI. Colonisers is great if you play with a lot of planets. One time I had 15 worlds. Usually my games end with me having 8-ish. colonizers is mediocre at best in these circumstances. Same with Adaptable. depending on map settings I usually find less than 5 extreme worlds in the whole galaxy, and usually I never find them before the AI does. You did mention using the map editor. That would certainly change things I suppose. But it depends on your starting location. Which I don't know if you can or cannot control.

Planet Ugrades:

On morale, here's a screenshot of part of a custom race's traits, notice I have the +2 morale selected. http://imgur.com/ZfojiVb. Now, here's my homeworld on turn 1:  http://imgur.com/ccA8fql. Notice the 90% morale. By midgame I'm usually down below 50% even with the diplomacy technology for +4 morale and one entertainment center adjacent to my capital. Once I get some economic starbases built I can usually recover back up to ~90. How do you manage to keep such high morale? I would kill for a race special ability that makes morale go away completely the same way synthetic races can ignore food.

I totally agree on tourism. I have tried taking the +2 tourism racial trait, plus the special race ability to start with tourism income enabled and used Serenity as my homeworld and still didn't get enough income to match the planet's maintenance midgame.

My experience with production and tech is completely the opposite of yours. I never have enough of anything. Probably because you have many more planets than me. Also the production wheel seems to work for you.

AI

My experience with the AI is again, vastly different than yours. At normal (and easy when I play at that level for unlocking accolades) I see the AI build new ships with different defenses and weapons often. They overbuild junk and don't upgrade, but they change stats outside of war pretty constantly. I do see the loads of tiny fleets everywhere, but unlike you they will attack successfully. Typically when the AI declares war on me, within 3 turns every starbase and shipyard I have is destroyed as each tiny fleet takes out one per turn. I typically do see them building huge fleets before war. Most of my games, again on easy and normal the AI has 5 or more ships defending each planet and each shipyard plus another 10-15 ships in 5 or 6 stacks of 2 or 3 ships each swarming around the map aimlessly or parked outside my starbases and planets (only once they start to hate me). So if an AI player has 5 worlds, I usually have something like 60 enemy warships on that border and they have another 30 defending the planets and shipyards. Starbases are typically left unguarded.

The biggest weakness I see is not using too much range but too few engines. My fleets move 12+ and they are moving 3. On the other hand, they usually can defeat my ships 1:1 until really late in teh game, so if I get into a diplomacy death spiral (where the AI is making demands every few turns and I either agree and go bankrupt or disagree and piss them off, then repeat a few turns later) and multiple AIs start declaring war I usually lose pretty fast. A secondary weakness is that unless I give it different military technologies all AI players give preference to red defense (projectile) and yellow offence (missile). Because they all do this, first its easy to counter, and second their early rounds of war with each other are stupidly self destructive. Some of the more peaceful races that don't develop any military tech just stack beams and shields. Watching them go to war is always comical.

The issue with transporters seems to be that some transporter fleets are just inactive. They never move anywhere or do anything. If the AI moves the transport at all, then it will use it to attack. Otherwise it just sits parked outside the shipyard where it was constructed and gathers dust.

On starbases, I've seen one game where an AI had 1 planet and 57 starbases. They had the second largest influence after me beating out neighboring races with up to 9 worlds. They typically build mines on every single resource and research stations for every artifact and one or more economic starbase and shipyard per planet. This lets them spread pretty far across the map. I've never seen the AI fail to build starbases.

My typical game settings are insane or one step down galaxy, uncommon stars, uncommon planets rare habitable planets uncommon extreme planets, no events, abundant minor races, no pirates, no anomalies, no ascendancy, rare artifacts, occasional UFP, and 12-16 AI players. I've recently started using tight clusters rather than spiral galaxy. Doesn't seem a whole lot different. Maybe having so many planets and resources like your setting makes the AI unable to know what to do with them?

@psychoak, how do you get over 100 raw production?

I thought hives were thalan tech tree and slave pits are drengin. Who gets both?

Thanks for those tips!

Thanks again!

@psychoak - you're right that just adding one specialised building will increase production massively for one attribute and I said something to that effect in my post.  My point was that if you go crazy for industry/pop and you're not using the govern trait it cuts out a huge amount of waste from specialised worlds wasting a large portion of their spending (i.e. research worlds are pretty bad at producing lots of industry and wealth - every BC spent on those wealth and industry on a research will be much less effective).  If you use starbase spam as well for all of their lovely bonuses the total difference isn't actually that big while being more versatile.  The versatility comes from being able to switch from one boosting project to another at will (i.e. military subsidies to cultural).

  In the one game where I tried it I got the UP chair and then the 50% influence bonus.  I was able to switch from military to culture production and start culture flipping nearby planets and gain a cultural victory.  The UP bonus and my crazy industry output was totes OP.  I was only able to switch instantly from a military conquest strategy so quickly due to the versatility of my planet setup.  The other alternative would have been to rebuild my planets as influence planets which takes longer.  I think this illustrates my point more clearly - it's not a maximally effective use of my planets - but reasonably close and much more versatile.

  Having max industry also meant that my planets upgraded in no time at all maximising planetary output ASAP, having a knock on effect of producing starbase spam that much more quickly which increase industry, etc.

  I said above several times that it won't be as efficient - I've agreed with you.  Still works

If i remember correctly, there's a Precursor world that comes with base influence of 10 or 20. I had three influence starbases around this planet and, let's just say that planet brought the nearby planets under my influence. Fast.