AI always kicking my ass

Well the AI has improved, it's better now at managing its colonies. From what I understand ships factor heavily in the power calculation, so don't get discouraged just because they have a higher rating.

For all the talk of the AI needing to improve, I have found this same issue since 1.3. The AI always, always have a higher rating than I do when I first meet them. I keep trying different tactics, and the only one I've seen that keeps me competitive is spamming colony ships and military. Whilst I can see the logical reasoning for this as a starting tactic, it does make the game less fun. I feel that rather than competing with many races for power, instead it feels like playing galactic command and conquer, where I'm just gathering resources and spamming attack units until I win. 

I hope that now the AI challenge has raised its game the devs will seek to keep the challenge up for gifted and beyond, but maybe nerf 'normal' mode a little so that non-aggresive options can be considered. Either that or reduce the importance of military power in relation to faction ratings so we can have a clearer idea of how powerful a cov really is. 

Did AI actually destroy you, or you abandon those games? Because it could be that just Power ratings are measured incorrectly - as if some variables have to much weight compared to ones that really matters or where is a mistake somewhere in formula for power calculation.

OR High player power ratings in games before 1.4 were because of planetary wheel that AI didn't use. 

OR Higher AI power ratings are because in 1.4 AI really improved it's planet-management and it resulted in overall better performance. 

Or mix of everything above.

And do not forget that even if his rating is two times higher than yours he still could be a paper tiger with badly composed fleets. In all 4x games or games  like Civilization on higher difficulties AL always have higher power ratings that players and players still win. Bad things could happen if AI misjudge power ratings - it become excessively aggressive, even in fact it cannot win. 

Madzai is correct. Often I will be in an insane large map on Normal or gifted. The ai will have 100's of ships. This will tend to make their relative power to yours highly imbalanced. He may be sitting at 540 and you are still 100 or he is 1200 and you are 300. Its ok. simply do your trades for research and get the best possible tech you can and customize your own ships. If you are able to open a trade window and peek at all his ships. Are the all beam focused or perhaps missiles? Are most of them small? 

You can out think the ai be seizing on his fleets of outdated ships. Simply build a custom ship that counters his attacks and attacks him where he has no defenses. Even a small amount of defenses on YOUR ships which counter his attacks will help. 

Then start building ships. If you have not done so try to dedicate a planet cluster that wil allow you to focus only on military production. I tend to use earth+mars and if any are nearby some other planets. 

Once you get a few counter fleets up, even if he does declare war you can withstand the tide of his ships as the crash upon yours!

It's this; the AI's military score often gets hugely inflated for some reason. I've even noticed this with AIs that have fewer, more primitive warships than I do. I'm not really sure why, either, because I can't replicate it as a player. They're inevitably far weaker than I am once it actually comes to fighting.

Wait, what? It takes you 200 turns to meet other races? I wish I were that lucky. 200 turns is the amount of time it usually takes for me to casually get set up and invade the rest of the galaxy.

Thank you all for the responses!

The idea that the power-scale is just inflated because of the AI having more ships is a tempting one, and I thought that it might originally be this. However I checked the power graphs, the one showing comparison of industry, tech, economy etc, and in each case they've been massively ahead of me and i have no idea why.

It could just be a matter of a learning curve ahead, but it is pretty demoralising thinking things are going well only to encounter some monster from the darkness between stars lol. Cinematic and narrative, yes, but when it always happens it becomes tiring. 

What pace are you playing the game? I knock out 200 turns in about an hour of game-play on normal and am nowhere near a position to invade anyone.

since when people don't have to learn to play games. Instead of playing for two weeks how about gaming for six months. You shouldn't be able to play a game right off the bat. You do know you need more than eight species for insane maps.

I play on normal pacing with slow research. Even on insane sized maps with 8 players, everyone is usually in contact by around turn 150, with the exception of maybe if a race is at the opposite corner from me. I also only play on Incredible or Godlike difficulty.

I play insane, normal or gifted with about 25 major ai and all minors for about 40 or 50 folks on the map. It feels about right and after the RUSH of colonization we all have between 12 and 20 planets a piece depending on settings. I play on maps where I drastically slim down the habitability available which makes for a fun game and makes each planet you find a precious gift! 

I have had this in my last game too. I didn't manage to colonise as many planets as usual and the Drengin had lots of planets next to them . They managed to massively outweigh me militarily and economically. They were producing large ships when I just barely managed to produce medium ones. Then my custom faction (which I was playing against) somehow managed to beat them (still don't know how). Both Drengin and later my custom faction when they got Drengia seemed to have an economic advantage. I thought they were getting bonuses, but I wasn't playing above Normal (embarrassing I know, but I play pretty casually). Now whenever I was talking to my custom faction their treasury was in the negative: started at -1000 went to -8000 and finally to -13000 or so. I don't know how that is possible... The graphs at the end showed that economically they were far above me all the time throughout the game. 

So I had a different experience on another run through. 

This time I grew to be the premier power in the galaxy. The first time I met a new civilisation I was well ahead of them in power. 

How strange?

I must admit either I got better or something odd happened. 

I found removing the Krynn Syndicate a wise choice. In the game that provoked me to start this thread, we were all sitting on about 500-800 power, while the Krynn were at 5000 power for some unknown, stupid reason.

Oh no, the AI has a higher power rating than you when you meet them ... *OMG*

Sorry, I have to laugh a bit about this being some sort of a problem. Since GalCiv2 in nearly all my games I was at the bottom of the power rating and had one of the weakiest military well until the mid or even late game - because I focus more on diplomacy, money and science to keep the AI at bay until I reach the break even point and overtake the AI in all fields, military included.

So ... no, you absolutely don't need to spam attack units from the start to win in GalCiv. No, you don't need to be Number 1 on all scores from the start to win. No, if the AI outscores you by an order of magnitude if you meet them it doesn't mean you will lose.

It's okay for the AI to kick your ass while you're getting the hang of the game. Remember, while it may have been programmed to play to its strengths, your strength as a human player is being maddeningly unpredictable.

I've been playing as a Synthetic race and it took me a while to realise that yes, I need to spam Assembly projects to keep building up my economy and offset the loss of population from sending out colony ships. On the upside though, as far as I can see there's no reason not to take four ability points out of Food and Growth and use them to bump up your other abilities.