I have the opposite problem. No one ever picks a fight with me. I don't like to start fights, but I like to do them, so I kind of try to get the opponents to fight me at times. I think it has something to do with the fact that I am always neutral, and so I don't have any natural enemies like good and evil civilizations have. Try being Neutral and building up a sizable army, and no-one will try to push you around.

EDIT: Also, trade with all of the civs. This keeps them from wanting to pick a fight. Research up the Trade tree, and Xeno Ethics, and get Neutral Shipping, and you will have 13-14 trade routes before you know it.

Given enough time on any size map, your cultural borders wil always clash with other empires, every square inch of the map will be claimed. So your always going to have (usually) more than one neighbour.

The single biggest bit of help i can give to anyone wishing to play on the hardest difficulty level and still win is to make sure youve got the most powerful economy ingame. That usually means at the start choosing the 30% economics bonus. Your economy influences everything else (by means of the spending sliders) and once youve got that up to a 100% and your still raking in the cash your well on the way. A few dedicated manufacturing and research planet(s) and all too soon the game will be to easy for you.

Well, i love combat, but i can't stand combat all the time, i love a good old peaceful time to build up my empire, but the thing i have noticed is that i read the beginner guide and created a race that it specified and i got a cultural victory and i never fired a shot.

It was with those evil monkeys (not sure what they are called), well, in the beginning, they declared war on me, so i had to mass-produce Defenders (which is all we both had) and i never had to use them, within like 10-15 turns, they begged for peace and from then on, he was giving me gifts and stuff like that.

The AI is aggressive, overly aggressive especially when they are stronger and it can be very annoying at times, but hey, it is impossible to make a perfect AI for a game.

Well, i just don't understand why the good ethic races (Altarians) tend to be dictators.

Yeah this has happened to me various times in the games. I was focusing on winning via spreading my goodness to the entire universe and all of a sudden in one turn I have the Altarians, Torians and Terrans declaring war on me (and one of them was on the other corner of the map, they kept attacking my well defended Economic Starbases which the Acreans gave me), and I did remember when talking to other AIs they kept saying I was weak since I didn't have a fleet since I was concentrating on trading and influence techs and I had virtually 0 military. Yeah, I know that in the deep recesses of space you shouldn't expect everyone to be all nice but... I found this to be ridiculous... doesn't the AI have morals... never hit a guy with glasses, no low blows, no biting... that sort of thing, I would expect this from the Drengin

Guys, I know that you have to be on top to survive, but the minute that someone surpasses me, even if I'm in the top 3 places, they start getting cool and find reasons to get into a war with me, no matter what I try to do. And it always happen to be that those huge and powerful empires that are much stronger than everyone else is right on my doorstep every single game. They always find our borders threatening, and pester me. Not even getting to the top place in military helps. On the contrary: those bullies enter an arms-race with me and cause me to lose alot of money and neglect all of my goals just to keep up with the arms race, until I get sucked into a very unwanted war. I wish just to be left alone for a while, and that's the problem.

If you're in the top three on the military strength chart and other races are still going "cool" on you, then try setting up trade routes with them. Trade is a great way to damp down hostility and redirect it to another faction. And it will also pump more cash into your economy. Once you get some steady trade going, the other factions will probably start sending their own trade freighters to your systems, which will (I think?) add even more of those little "+" signs in the Relations screen.

But don't neglect military deterrence, because that has to be part of the equation. I can almost always keep everyone off me with a combination of military strength and trade. If your economy is really strong, you can also bribe them away..... but I always consider that more of a desperation move, unless you just really enjoy playing the diplomatic angles more than economic/military strategies.