Nations too powerfull af startup

What difficulty are you playing?

AI gets significant bonuses on higher difficulties, such as a movement multiplier for all their ships.

What galaxy configuration are you using?

Starting position in a new galaxy can often make or break a game, especially for the AI. If you play tight clusters and start out in a tiny star cluster with barely any planets or resources, you will naturally be disadvantaged against an opponent that starts out in a large cluster of stars with plenty of planets and resources. More planets means more production and more research.

i start with normal difficulty against normal ai. the Galaxy is redundand i tried severall setups. the size is the highest i can run on 8gb.

usually i start with one planet, i takes me about 8 turns to make a colony ship and a few more to reach te first planet. By that time the ai has got himself 10 planets and 20 tech.

Thanks for your reply

Then it looks like your play style might be the cause. Are you taking advantage of the rush build option?

If you are spending 8 turns to make a colony ship, you are probably splitting your social construction with military construction. This means your improvements get build out slower, and you end up with fewer techs. It is better to make use of your starting cash to either rush improvements or rush colony ships (this is what the AI usually does) to colonize more planets, or if you know how to balance your funds, you can rush both ships and improvements. You end up burning through your initial credits very fast, but in the early game, this makes a large difference.

Hello Volare, no, there is not a bug. But there is a large learning curve. I recommend dropping the AI down a notch until you have a better grasp of the mechanics and are able to formulate a competitive strategy.

Strategies differ. I only play Godlike, and in the early rush for colonies I rush build my shipyard first turn from my homeworld and then rush build a light colonyship I designed from that shipyard.

After selecting your starting ship, Press and hold the control button down on your keyboard, then hover the cursor over the closest star systems, a tooltip will popup telling you their range. (Use the minimap to estimate the stars location)

Remove the unnecessary life support systems from your colonyship in the designer. Every point counts to lowering your rush build cost and your manufacturing cost.

Tailor all your ships to your needs, have options available with more or less engines, lifesupport, etc. Then latter do the same with your warships. A new colony's production is wasted if its taking you 28 turns to build a ship. Design a model you can produce within a few turns and churn them out. As your production grows increase your ships manufacturing cost with increased firepower or hull size.

Ideally, you should have burned through most of your starting money by turn 10, preferably earlier. With enough left to cover 20 or more turns of your budget deficits. Do not go negative with your treasury. At this stage in the game you may be dependent on your explorer conducting surveys to keep you from financial trouble until you develop trade routes and begin trading other goods with the other civs.

By turn 10-15 you should be able to manufacture colony ships in 2-3 turns from your homeworld.

Everytime you colonize a new planet, you should do two things at this stage in the game.

1. Have your new colonies immediately begin construction of a shipyard, one per star system, otherwise you waste their production by not having their starship construction points.

2. Assign the new planet to an existing shipyard while they build a new shipyard. Even if it is far away it will provide 1 point minimum which is helpful early game. Just make sure you queue construction of the new shipyard at the planet first before you assign it or you will not have the option to build one.

On your planets do not waste time building projects not immediately needed for your strategy. You will not be building cities yet so dont bother with farms. Dont build your resources until you have constructed your manufacturing or research. Although depending on the resource you may be able to trade it for valuable money with other civs. The more manufacturing you have on your planet the less time it takes to construct your other projects and ships.

In addition to what has already been said, the thing to focus on early is a planet's raw production.  It is the primary contributor to your social production, ship production, research, and income.  So use some of your starting money to build asteroid mining bases, as a nearby asteroid will contribute +1 directly to your raw production.