The true cause is quite obvious, especially to anyone who has ever modded AI before. It is actually very difficult to build a competent AI in a complex game such as GC3, which is something that a good developer will keep in mind when designing the mechanics of the game.
Okay, so what's the cause?
No, "toxic personality" is not the cause. Where is the AI programming deficient?
If you know that then you know how to fix it. If you don't know that then your statement above is bullshit.
I've already stated exactly what the cause of the problem is, but I'll repeat myself for your benefit. AI is difficult to program, which is why smart game developers will keep the AI in mind when developing systems in the game. Strategy games can benefit from depth, but features are meaningless if you can't get the AI to use them.
In GC2, the AI understood how to grow its economy. It used a mixture of farms, morale buildings, and production modifiers in its cities. Growing your population in GC2 was as simple as building a farm on a planet, and many planets didn't need any farms at all, the way the economy worked in that game. Often if you did want to build a farm, one was enough. You would rarely need two or more.
In GC3, population growth is a two step process. You must build farms to increase the global food supply, and then you must gather the necessary resources (promethium). Then, once you've done that, you can build cities on your planets. From a game play perspective, this is a cool system, but from an AI programming perspective it is very tricky. I don't doubt a serious development company with a good budget and good team could make an AI understand how to use this system, I just know it would be a lot of work.
Right now, the AI goes about filling up its tiles with all kinds of factories, labs, space elevators, etc. Farms aren't even on the list of things to build, which is problem one and quite frankly ridiculous that this bug wasn't caught. Even if the AI did want to build cities it would never be able to, but cities aren't on its list to build either.
So what happens is what you now see. The AI, on Godlike, is a threat for the first 75-100 turns. Once you survive to that point, you've won the game, because your economy will become bigger than the other 7 civs in the game combined, simply because you understand how to build cities.
Stardock should never have released the AI as it currently exists.
Anyway, I'm getting tired of arguing about this crap here. Seriously, there is a whole world of games out there. Stardock really messed this game up, it's broken, and one of its developers (or the owner?) comes on the forum and whines about how much he hates criticism. I was scammed by this company for 70 bucks, and that sucks, but I gotta move on. I don't expect this game will ever be fixed and I have zero interest in fixing it myself, even though I am a very experienced modder.
If the game gets fixed, I'll be pleasantly surprised. But I'm going to stop coming to this forum so often and just go about playing other games and giving my hard earned money to companies that deserve it.