Ok if you have other races at war with them, did you remember to gift a starbase or two to those races? so their ships have range to your area?

Also you should be giving worlds to your allies as well to create buffer zones and draw allied ships to your area because they will want to defend those planets.

But what you really need to dig yourself out of the hole is marauding ships that are fast to attack enemy asteroid mines. It also distracts the enemy from attacking you so much by chasing those ships. Also you need sneaky fleets with transports to sneak around and steal poorly defended enemy worlds. You need to keep hitting them this way, they retake the worlds, so what? Jump the population out ahead of them as much as possible.... keep taking other worlds, keep them on the back foot. If you cannot succeed to produce those sneaky fleets to take poorly defended enemy worlds then you know its time to give up.

The other two games were on Genius, and then the lower intelligence before that.

I am in this category.  My rule of thumb is: if I live to turn 150, they are doomed by turn 250 at the latest.  A lot of that is my play style that creates an accelerating come-from-behind triumph type of victory.  Otherwise, I get mercilessly overwhelmed, often by multiple opponents. Some of that seems to be an unintended effect of high level bonuses.  They seem to affect early game play more than later.  Whatever the causes, it is almost always lopsided one way or another. I have had very few drawn out games because of military or economic parity.  However, those were the most fun and challenge and satisfaction. It is my hope that later game mechanic adjustments and continuing later AI development will help re-create that ongoing challenge effect.  I am especially interested in more balanced battles, which is where the lopsided nature of things shows up the worst.  Big ships beating up little ships is satisfying, but big ships beating up other big ships is actually even better!

One thing I think the AI needs to learn to do is gang up on the human if they are running away with the game.  I don't care if it is unfair human-focused AI behavior or not. It would make the game more fun to play than rolling over 40 little factions one by one. If you had an overall clumping up behavior, it could also group up diplomatic negotiations for alliance victories, etc.

Yea, well you have to come from behind because the AI is all about the early game. Surviving that, is pretty much all the game is about, then after that its time to quit because the challenge is gone.

My long time idea has been 'incremental difficulty levels'. After x number of turns, the difficulty level increases.... then again after so many more turns....  just imagine how much that would liven up the later AI game while allowing you to survive the early game??? wow!

All my races are custom, via xml. They goto war alot, with player, Minor and AI.

It depends actually.... if for example i set 'no tech trading' on, usually the AI will be stronger in that game and hit me hard.

But usually i set tech brokering only, in those games the AI is usually not attacking me if i do well, and i usually do well. Also my standard difficulty level is genius with Drengin set to the next level up.

Now what i am thinking of trying next is to put anomalies on 'none', and that should stop me tricking up my technology and building ships that scare the AI!! lol

Also the new set of well defended anomalies (DLC), some of the rewards seem overpowered to me? So probably best not to have them.

Ok what else? Well, one of my other strategy i used to use which worked all too well in making the AI more aggressive was to find a map with a smaller isolated cluster of worlds in order to prevent my excessive expansion. I never was able to survive that scenario however! lol And now with the special ship components you can get when colonizing worlds.... i don't want small clusters anymore!

More specifically its the percentage boost to production that i think is overpowered, everything else is not so bad, dousn't really impact the game so significantly, i can live with it, and i can live with the AI not exploring them. If they were to change that production boost one to precursor ship components, now that would be much more fun!

Yea, mostly its the production ones... production/manufacturing.... not good.

Are there logistics ones?

In my current advanced game, i have cleaned up all the advanced anomalies long ago, and i have traded ALL trade goods to myself, no one else has any at all.

Plus i have my Hyperion logistics on a powerful military bonus and surrounded by powerful military adjacency.

Plus i have a custom race with extra logistics.

Total logistics i am allowed is 72, total Drengin is allowed is 76

This is the closest i have ever been to their cheating logistics and look at all the crap i needed to do it!

Mebe i did not happen to get any logistics anomalies? Its possible? but as things stand, logistics anomaly bonuses don't bother me one bit.

Quoting Horemvore,

reply 16

There is a Logistic Anomoly, +5 bonus per anomoly. This adds up if you get lucky

Yea, no good.... but just imagine how much more fun this anomaly would be if it gave you a one off logistics ship component instead of a fleet wide bonus? Make it at least + 10 for that though!

Go to this Forum thread.  There's a link there that will take you the GC3 knowledge base.  Towards the bottom of that page are instructions (or a link, I forget) on how to open a support ticket to report a bug.

Turn 412? wow!

There are a few tricky things i did not know for a long time playing this game which greatly improved my game if you don't happen to know already, here they are;

1) Trade goods stack

2) switch your technology research to something very expensive before claiming any yellow diamond anomaly, then switch back after claiming it.

3) put your shipyard projects - hyperion shrinker especially on a level 3 military resource and then surround it with + military adjacency structures, the higher the better

4) The race attributes (+ or - speed, sensors all that) in Galciv2, i thought they disappeared in Galviv3 for a long time. Only last month i found them all hiding in the custom race set up! Now i can reduce things that are not useful to my strategy and increase things that are, and is amazingly brilliant!

Edit: so the big one is trade goods.... game says "one per race"..... bulshit!

So if your playing a larger map, you can acquire ones that make your ships more powerful.... especially the one that increases capacity, if nothing else, get as many as you possibly can and your ships massively improve, its huge, and for so long i did not take advantage due to in game description "one per race".

Update on that bug I reported:  They had me send my save game to them, and they found the problem.  They said they'll fix it in update 1.84.  Maybe that will help with the flip side of the problem too.

The one per race I believe is a setting for planets, so you can't get more than a single one on a planet.