I have never once ever needed for money in over 1000 hours of play. What difficulty are you playing on? I play on Gifted. What size maps are you playing on? In fact in the all the games I play I rarely build more than say 6 7 ship battle fleets. That's it. I leave the majority of my planets 'undefended' as I like the thought of them tempting the ai and him DoWing me for them. I just stroll on over and explain it to him. 

You are probably doing something wrong with your strategy.

Here are some stats from my last game:

Turn: 161
Homeworld Manufacturing: 1456.3
Homeworld Research: 1097.8
Homeworld Population: 134.5

Total Worlds: 9
Total Population: 816.4
Total Manufacturing: 5239
Total Research: 5514
Total Income (Savings/Trade/Tourism): 1609 (1042/414/152)
Total Maintenance: 850
Balance: 758

I wasn't playing very income focus, i.e. I easily could have had twice the trade income at the time. As you can see, you neither need 300 turns nor 55 worlds to generate 1700 income.

My best guess is that you have too low population at your planets. Otimized economy is something like: 50-70% of planetary improvements are food and approval and every planet has 5+ economic starbses covering it.

Since you seem to have too many constructors, are you building all weapons upgrades on starbases? If yes then reduce those in favor of fleets.

Also one more tip, don't try to have a stationary fleet at every planet. Identify key positions, at these you station large highly mobile fleets and establish good sensor range. That way you can intercept enemy fleets. Key positions for me usually are, very outward starbases then shipyards and then planets or starbases. Experience and practice will make you better at identifying these.

Regardless of your play style, the way the game is right now, garrisoning planets with ships is unnecessary.

The Ai can't send more than 1 transport per fleet with 2.5 troops, so any reasonable amount of planetary defense and resistance will successfully defend every time.  If you play with lots of resources, put an elerium shield everywhere and you're done.  Or research some of the Militarization techs.  Frees up your ships to do more fun things with.  By turn 300 in your example game, both those options are viable.

The Ai also badly prioritizes engine research and installation on ships, so while you have a speed of 10+, it's still running around at 3 or 4.  All those garrison fleets can be made into attack fleets to pick them off on the way, as others suggested.  

Those are my suggestions for how to deal with some of the issues you mentioned.  But modding works too, and that's what it's for.  Have fun!

 

 

Thanks for the tip, I will try. Arround turn 300 my homeworld have a population of 25, with a cap at 29.

 

Yes, it is a great thing that they made a moddable game.

 

I don't know if the game is easier with my mod, but it is easier to produce and maintain a strong army. In the game I'am testing, the problem the AI seems to have is the low number of colonized planets. At turn 300, I have colonized two times more planets.

 

I will try with a harder difficulty.

 

About AI modding, I quickly looked at the AI files, it seems to be harder to mod, but I will have a closer look. I also wonder if the AI can use the starbase military factory module I have created.

Dude no wonder you found it hard and decided to mod it to suit you better, you simply do not understand the mechanics. GC3 is all about RP and the single biggest booster to RP is....Population. Your homeworld should have 80+ pop at least. (I aim for 150)

Take a look or use if you so wish, my AI Tweaks Mod. Yes the AI can use custom starbase modules, but, you have to add it to the AIStarbaseGovernor.xml.

Today, I have programmed a software that compute approximatly the best number of food/approval improvement to build in function of the available tiles on a planet, and in function of the number of economic starbases arround the planet. The program says I'am doing good for economical and research planets that have no economic starbases, but I'am doing wrong for the production planets, like the homeworld. Another point is that I'am late on population enhancement, I usually build these improvements in the mid-game. I think I'am also wrong on this point.

 

Thanks, but i have a problem with the line:

Should I write:

Or without the "DontRequestConstructor" line ?

Huh?
Is that because you build your research worlds differently from your manufacturing worlds? I would be astounded you got different results for research and manufacturing worlds, since the basic improvement has the same stats for both.

My philosophie in population is:
More then everything else, time is the limiting ressource on population, therefore I increase the growth rate of my empire as much as possible without hitting the food cap too hard. You can catch up in approval or lacking manufacturing pretty quickly, but lacking population hurts in the long run.

Hmm, what I did was a approximative calculation (on the example of research):

Total Research = Rt = Production*Research-modificator
with
Production = P = P0 + n1*PB
and
Research-modificator = R = R0 + n2*PB

n1 and n2 are the number of boni (PB and RB respectively) of the type which raise production (food improvements) and research (research improvements)

now you have a limited number of boni you can take per planet n, such that n = n1 + n2.
At this point I have also made the approximation of no adjacency boni.

Now I can determine the maximum of Rt(n1), which turns out to be:

n1_optimal = n/2 + R0/2RB - P0/2PB

ok, so for R0/RB = P0/PB the optimal balance is 50% production improvements and 50% research improvements.
If we now assume for example, that we don't need approval improvements and that one bonus corresponds to one maximum tier improvement, we get:

P0 = 8 = 3 (colony capital production) + 5 (colony capital food)
PB = 5 (Lossless Farm)

R0 = 100%
RB = 60% (Discovery sphere)

and therefore:

n1_optimal = 1/2 * ( n + 1.67 - 1.6 ) = n/2 + 0.035

Thus approximately half of all improvements should be food improvements.

So what would a starbase do?

A starbase will add 50% to R0, since it does not cost you an improvement tile, so with 4 research starbases you get:

R0 = 300% = 100% (base value planet) + 4x50% (4 starbases with best starbase module)
RB = 60% ...
R0/RB = 5
and
n1_optimal = n/2 + 1.67

The balance is shifted in favor of food improvements!

We can do the same for capitals:

We add the difference of the gains of the capital and a normal improvement to the Base value:

R0 = 140% = 100% (base value planet) + 100% (Tech capital) - 60% (1 discovery sphere)
RB = 60%
R0/RB = 2.33

n1_optimal = n/2 + 0.33

Again, the balance is shifted towards food improvements

The same applies for manufacturing capitals, power plants, etc.

Further Considerations:

Vice versa, somthing that increases your food like the +1 food tech (or an asteroid mine) will increase the P0 value and therefore shift the balance in favor of research buildings.

Approval will decrease the Bonus effect of food improvements, since you need 1 approval building per farm for example and therefore PB is cut in half. Thus starbase approval modules can increase the number of food improvements by a lot, since for a while you don't need to build approval improvements.

Starbases in general are a big deal and all you can do on them allows you to have more food improvements. This also has the side effect that you don't need to specialize your worlds so much anymore! A world with high food, 4 starbases with manufacturing modules and a power plant is a decent manufacturing world and manufacturing worlds will contribute a lot more to research. And both will contribute a lot more to economics if you build the appropriate starbase modules.

So, this is where I get my 50-70% figure from. For normal improvements without adjacencies it is clos to 50% and starbases, player and galactic achievements, passive boni from tech etc. contribute a lot more to shift it towards having more food improvements. Plus all worlds are more versatile.

So, the take home message is: get starbases for all worlds! You can get up to 6 for a single world and the manufacturing cost for maxing a starbase is lower then the cost of getting highest tier planetary improvements for the same amount of boni (hubs and uniques not withstanding). It is even more efficient if a starbase covers 2+ planets.

 

edit: I should probably also clarify why I assum I can neglect approval; my approval without improvemnts usually is:

3 (colony capital) + 2 (content 2 faction trait) + 8 (passive from approval tech tree) + 20-30 (starbases)
multiplied by
100% (base value) + 20% (government tech tree) + 25% (virtual world)
=
47.85 - 62.35

if I am malevolent with intimidation center:

64.35 - 83.85

The gap can usually be compensated by 1 or two additional approval buildings, so I tend to neglect it.

 

edit2: I would also like to point out, that there are range extension modules for starbases. You can have 9 starbases affecting a planet with the first range extension and 14 with the second one. These require a special shape of th first 5 however (you can only have 5 without range extension in that shape).

I also found a formation that allows 4 starbases without and 10 with the first range extension, but only 11 total with the second range extension.