I must be getting old

You're not the first to write a post like this.  I scanned back in the forum a couple of pages and found this thread, which if you read through it might give you some good tips on how to play more effectively. 

I'll give the same advice I give everyone that is struggling with getting out paced by the AI:

1. 2-1 ratio on Manufacturing Plants or Research Centers vs Farms on every single on of your Manufacturing and Research worlds. If you do not have enough tiles for this, a minimum of 2 farms with a Food hub and the rest of the tiles as Manufacturing Plants or Research Centers. Do not worry about approval, see next tip.
2. Build Economy Starbases, these are your biggest boosters to planetary production. You can fit 7 around a system, one in the middle(if a system has 2 planets place it in between them if not as close to you Planet as possible) and the rest at each hex point 5 tiles from the center one. Some you will not be able to place until you get the first range extender if there is only one planet. But the four that you will be able to place should do fine until you research the first extender tech. You want to get the approval modules up asap.
3. Wise choice of Ideology traits. There are several ways to do this, my favorite is Pragmatic first for the 3 free constructors, 1 I use to make a Eco starbase in my starter system the other 2 I upgrade to colonizers. Benevolent next for the free colony ship. Malevolent 3rd for the Intimidation center, I then beeline this tree all the way to 20% RP at the end. I am sure others will show you other choices that can be equally beneficial.
4. I usually spend my starting credits building up my first 3 worlds, Homeworld as a hybrid Manu/Research world and next two as a manufacturing worlds. Once all 3 are filled up any remaining credits I will build/rush colonizers with one constructor thrown in to build a second shipyard. I then switch the 3 built up worlds to Military Subsidies and start cranking out colonizers/constructors.
5. I usually have a ratio of 2 Research worlds to every Manufacturing world and 1 Wealth world for every 3 Research worlds.
6. Use a custom Race. One you have min/maxed to suite your style of play, I Max out traits:- Farmers, Dense, Content, Fertile, Militant, Tough, Likeable, Fast, Organized, Accurate, Agile and min the rest, I leave Adventuresome and Resilient alone, I end up with one point spare which I usually put in Observant or Resilient.

I play up to Genius on vanilla with this build. Needs tweaking for the difficulties higher than Genius.

Well I've seen one post where someone never used factories. This is a bad idea. Just referencing to the above 2 per one is fine unless your playing yor. You don't need your pop way above your current so it would be ok to build factories if your current is below minimum. 

Don't build shipyards on planet use constructors. My current plan for shipyards is one for colonies one for constructors for resources. One for ecomic starbases. Later one more for ships to shift pop to other planets and one for warships. Remember to adjust starbase for most manufacturing. You don't have to build ships right away. Build a few factories first. Use mercenaries they help. Ie duranthium refineries a good idea. 

That's my thread, lol

I also had trouble with Elemental.... the trick is you need to build your own maps, then its fun!

Yea, so Galciv2 is very money economy sensitive - dare to build a factory and immediately go broke! but Galciv3 is not like that, you can pump out a few factories on pretty much every world and your economy is fine, Galciv3 you should avoid relying on money, you could almost play and completely ignore it, rush buying is very inefficient. that is the main big difference from Galciv2

What you need to know for a good start in galciv3....

First tech to go for is interstellar survey.

First planet colonized, you need to go for pragmatic ideology and get the three free constructors.

You need to find Thalium resource, if possible also Promethium and put one or two of those starting constructors on them. (use the third one for range extention)

with interstellar survey researched, and with at least 1 thalium and 1 promethium, you can build a very nice survey ship with prototype engine and survey module on a cargo hull with heaps of range extention. This is a brilliant early survey ship that will boost your early game allot.

Another tip - the yellow triangle anomalies that sometimes give you a free tech.... whenever you find one, change your research to the most expensive research you can find before claiming it.... this gives brilliant boosting to keep up with or even exceed AI technology.

The rest is easy!

Hmm, you haven't given us much to go on, but to win against easy either of the suggested starting strats above will work. You have a lot of free room as to what you can do on the easy strategies.

I will just state a few misconceptions, which I think are or might be common:

• Money based economies: As two previouse posters allready said, these are inefficient in GC3. You will need to find your balance of Wealth/Research/Manufacturing. Horemvore gave you an excellent example. Another example would be me: I build high population worlds, which all have some manufacturing and then mostly research. All of my worlds are manufacturing AND research worlds at the same time. My money come from trade ships and economy bonusses of my starbases.
• Population: Many people underrate population in this game. You should however keep an eye on your worlds to make sure they don't get population capped. Once you amange to do this, go further and try to fit growth buildings into your build earlier.
• Coercion: If you use the economy wheel too much, that means if you put it to 100% research for example, you get severe penalties to you planetary output of every kind. Unless you love micromanaging, just try to play with 40% research, 40% production, 20% wealth. You can also go to 44/44/12 without the coercion penatly setting in.
• Colonizing phase: I should have probably mentioned this as m first point... Colonizing worlds as early as possible is your highest priority. For each colony you get a colony capital, which is the most costefficient improvement you can build in the game. The growth of your civilzation is primarily influenced by this in the early phase, I usually spend my early income on colonizers and 2-3 scout ships and not on planetary improvements at all. Other people play differently, but I usually only put 1 pop on my colony ships. This is because my homeworld is naturally the most developed world and in a simplified way, you can view it like this: Planetary_output = Population times Planetary_improvements.
• Ressource plants: Mystikmind suggested getting eary promethium and thulium to build ships with it. Another excellent use for Promethium, Thulium and Durantium are the planetary improvements Promethion Reserve, Thulium Data Archives and Durantium refineries.
• Military build-up: I am guessing here, but usually you can go without building any combat ships for the first 50-70 turns. on lower difficulties probably even longer. These are ressources which are spend in a way that doesn't contribute to the growth of your empire. Unless, of course ...
• Trade: I personally am a fan of trade ships. The hit two birds with one stone: They usually bring in enough money for me to not go bankrupt and they keep my neighbors happy. So I can do what my civs like doing most: Researching stuff without worrying about military build up too much. In this case I actually do dedicate a few spaces of improvements to economy (trade capital etc.).
• Tech trading: I allways forget this, because I play with the option turned off. But tech trading with other civilizations can be really strong, too.

I have tried to keep this rather general, because if you are struggling with the lower AI tiers, you should have plenty of room to develope you own starting strategy (because to me this is one of the most fun parts about these games), according to your own preferences. Playing purely with the benevolent ideology for example is also very possible. There are amazing traits in there. Remember what I said about early colonizing and population? You can get a free colonizer + 3 population as a first tier trait and another world to colonize as the second tier of it. If you are fearing, that someone starts a war on you, you can also try to go for one of the pragmatic trades (bottom left, forgot what it is called), it gives you 50 turns, during which nobody can declare war on you.

If you want more advice, it could be helpful, if you told us how you play: map size, number of opponents, how you spend your early money, how you set up your worlds, how quickly you colonize, what you are researching early on, what is the race you play, which ideologies do you use, etc.

So far as early military build up is concerned..... i have a couple of nice tricks for that;

When you set up your game, put minor races on 'abundant'. Then put tech brokering on.

During the game you can sell techs to the minor races, and when they don't have much money, you can buy some of their combat ships each time with your techs. The combat ships are very expensive but since they don't have enough cash for your techs, you really have nothing to lose, and i find all these ships add up allot over time and push my power rating way up.

The other thing that helps my power rating allot is to get a few more ships that can explore pirate anomalies. I usually look at whatever resource is excess and apply 1 of those prototype weapon on a medium hull along with prototype survey module and engines and i shield module and whatever range extension and sensors will fit. Also if i get free survey ships i like to upgrade these to this ship that can take down pirate protected anomalies. Once you have a few of these going, your defender type ships start pouring in from all directions.

None of this is much good for actual combat, but its all about your power rating to deter attackers.

https://forums.galciv3.com/476049/page/1/#3625533

That's a much better post for seeing "I suck" and "this is why" responses.  There seems to be a lot of people who over-value bonuses to the detriment of their productivity.

Creating sets of seven is very important for maximum effectiveness.  A full set of six basic factories around even just another factory results in only a 105% bonus from the factories, and a 120% bonus from adjacency.  If you get factories ringing higher level bonuses, especially the 3's and 4's, even max tech factories will have a very high amount of their impact be from adjacency throughout the game.  Even taking advantage of a +3 can be a severe penalty to the productivity of a world when you hose the overall layout in return.

Adjacency.... yes!

And sometimes you get a map where all the planet tiles are just blahhh and cannot even get a group of 4.... you need to watch out for this kind of crap map because its just not worth the effort trying to make this shit work until you get to the higher terrifying techs to fix it.

Auto-correct FTW.  He meant terraforming.

Quoting psychoak, reply 9

Auto-correct FTW.  He meant terraforming.

End of psychoak's quote

Auto correct options for terraforming 1) transforming 2) terminating

I wonder what i typed to get terrifying? Teraforming? No, terrafforming? no, terriforming? Bingo! we have a winner..... hahahahaha

Auto correct sucks on tablets.

I think the advice in this thread is hitting the nail on the head on why I don't find myself wanting to play anymore.  You "have to" rush constructors using ideology, build a ton of planetary star bases, stack sensors (which still feels like cheese to me, sorry), etc.  

You have all these wonderful races, different ideologies, and potential for role-playing and re-playability, but to compete there is a pretty linear path.

Compete with what? I usually play large maps with 8 genius AIs (modded).

I don't use the constructor trick and I don't use sensor ships. Depending on my mood I go for the benvolent or the malevolent ideology tree. Either works fine.

Since you are playing against AIs which are pretty shackled by design, you also don't need to go for maximum exploit builds. If you want more roleplay just lower the AIs difficulty and you can pull off the build you want.

I am not saying the balance is great, but it is sufficent for a single player title for the most part.

The main thing that I'm seeing that I'm also slow to incorporate into my game is unlike GalCiv II where cap was at 22 mil (ruffly) per planet even w/ many farms and entertainment buildings although different things may allow to get a little more there is no hard cap that I've run into in GalCiv III.  So playing GalCivIII similar to GalCiv II puts you behind mid game because of this.  I was stuck only using 2 or so farms per planet and you need more in GalCiv III.

If I play normal opponents, I do not have to stack 6 starbases on each planet, rush constructors, etc.

To keep up with cheating prick AI at higher levels, yes, I have to abuse the shit out of a highly abusive system the AI doesn't exploit...

Also one note about morale maybe:

Don't be too concerned, if your morale isn't 100%. 100% is nice for its population growth boost early on and for influence, but in terms of production (and consquently research/manufacturing/wealth) the difference isn't all that big staying somewhere around 40-60% is fine, too.

@psychoak, well if you wanna play vs. your +300% production AI you gotta do what you gotta do. But if you appreciate playing without it, who gives a shit if you play at a lower difficulty?

Different story would be multiplayer. Though I am not convinced would be the ultimate start there either.

Well no, i think the problem is the same with most strategy games.... the AI comes hard early game then flopping over later on. I have actually thought how nice it would be to have incremental difficulty levels..... where after a certain period of time in the game, the difficulty level increases - that would solve the problem!

But the main purpose of this thread is to help a fairly new player get over the line. Once he knows how to beat the AI then he can experiment with other play styles, no problem.

Well, to be clear, I'm hardly a new player, hence my frustration.

(So, the AI cheats in this version?  What ever happened to Stardock's pride in having AI that was smart and didn't need to cheat?  I thought their whole reason for going 64 bit this time was to make it even smarter.)

I think that the bottom line from what I'm reading above is that instead of an open game where you can play the leader you want to play, it's become a spreadsheet game where you can only play conqueror and have to set things up in one linear, specific way in order to win on even the easiest difficulty.

That's unfortunate.  Thank you to everyone who took the time to try and help me, though.  It was honestly a sour grapes post that I wasn't really expecting any helpful responses to.  Score one for this awesome community on this one.

The AI receives handicap advantages above normal.  If you consider that cheating, go right ahead.  Stardock has always said they have the one AI that all players go against and the levels are in the handicap bonuses, not in any behaviors.  So, there is no need to sound shocked about anything here.

I do not play the way you say.  I play for a technical victory.  Often, I have to fend off invaders.  Many times, I do not.  A few times, I get stomped on.  This was on Godlike, but now it is on Incredible because the AI seems to get incrementally smarter with each patch or update.  If it were as spreadsheet linear as you describe, I would not be seeing this wild variation in games.  

It would be worthwhile to take some of the excellent advice in the posts in this thread and have more fun with more success.  Figuring out the mechanics of things always helps me, that's for sure.  Also, a bit of playing around with the galaxy settings is a good idea.  It makes a lot of difference, and there might be something that fits your initial play style better.

There is fun to be had.  Sometimes it needs to be spiced with a little frustration to get that full satisfying "I got you now!" moment.

Not sure what difficulty you are playing on but I've been playing on Gifted and winning pretty frequently, and I wouldn't consider myself a great strategy gamer.  Try watching some of Macsen LP's Let's Plays on YouTube. . . they are extremely helpful.  Here's my main recommendations:

1) You MUST do well during the colonization stage in the beginning and totally focus on getting as many good planets as you can.  If you don't do this part well, you have no chance.  You should be 100% focused on the beginning in just getting a colony ship to planets and claiming them.

2) You must pick the right ideology items early on so that you can reap the benefits later in the game.

3) Negotiate open borders and research diplomacy early on to keep you out of war

4) Set your "govern" triangle at 40/40/20 (20 being money) and just leave it there.  Honestly the economy system in the game is pretty much broken in my opinion. . . you just leave it there, try to not "rush" buy too many things, and "re-up" at the "minor race bank" when you run out.

5) Trade with minor races for cold, hard cash to keep your economy going

6) Later, cause mayhem by trading with various factions to go to war with each other, particularly if there's one that is going to declare war on you

7) You need to trade technologies, but be very careful about giving the major AI's a lot of money or good techs. 

8) I personally play with "Tech Brokering" turned off.  Otherwise it's just too much micromanaging with the technology.

9) Turn off "Auto Upgrade" of your planets. . . the AI is retarded and will totally mismanage your planet.

10) Build a ton of constructors (make a short range one that's cheap) to build economy starbases around your planets once the colonization phase is finished, and to build shipyards on your frontiers.

If you want to play on genius and beyond, this linear path might be what you settle for. I know I do not need all of and I play against genius AI, which is modded in several ways where stardocks AI is lacking.

If you ever aim for incredible or godlike, then take another look at the constructor start, starbase spamming and stuff like that.

On normal you can do hilarious stuff to the AI without it. You can go really fast population growth and just own the United planets because your population is more then half the galaxy's population. You can play Krynn, make sure you have high approval, get a lot of influence (maybe a few influence starbases) in the process and laugh at the AI while their people convert to you. You can play seclusionist and just research and get ahead that way. You can also go ape on everyone and rush invasion tech and just overrun the first neighbor in sight (btw, this is how another forum member plays on godlike and pulled of a turn 91 research victory. Without constructor start.).

On normal and below, you only really need to know one thing: colonies help your empire grow the best at the start. Especially on normal you then have a myriad of options.

If you want to give up on GC3, then do what you must. But you are wrong if you believe you need any singular special strategy to beat AIs up to the point where they start getting big bonusses.

If you don't want to give up just yet:

This is where the random map generator plays its hand.

A new player will not know if the random map generator has decided to shaft him big time, and this 'shafting' ability should not be underestimated.... its perfectly capable of deciding if you win or lose before you even start playing...... remember this, and don't be afraid to restart if the shafting is out and about.

Honestly, i have frequently started games where the first 20 star systems i found around my starting point were all barren, and that is with habitable planets set to 'abundant'.... so again i say you really have to watch what the random map generator is giving you and keep your finger on the start new game menu options!

Agreed that it is possible to get a complete crap start.  But even with a crap start, there's still fun to be found in trying to figure out a way to win against all odds.  For example, I typically rush a colony ship or two in the beginning but then hold off on rushing anymore until I make sure there's actually a planet to colonize with it.  So if you don't rush another colony ship you could theoretically use the money to rush some production and research buildings and maybe make a run at planetary invasion so you can steal a minor race's planet or something.  Anyway my point is I would probably keep playing even if it was a crap start. . .

The fine art of appreciating a "crap start" is something that partially eludes me.  I like my maps kind of open, where we all have a little room before we start smashing empires together.  The RNG occasionally puts me right next to an AI player as its version of a whimsical joke.  I restart immediately.  It doesn't happen all that often, so I resist the temptation to pre-check maps by removing FOW.  So , while I sometimes play for the challenge, I support those who do map-based restarts for the fun aspect.

I have been trying some MP, which is out of character for me, but interesting.  The other player creates crowded maps, which completely bollixes my play style.    I am learning lots with every session and loving it, but I would never play that way as an SP game.

To relate this to the OP, it is possible to shape the game with the initial choices.  It might take a little trial and error, because there are a lot of settings, they have different effects on the game, and player preferences vary wildly.  Once you find a sweet spot that creates the kind of Galactic History you are looking for, it can get addicting, and then you have to really think hard about what parameters you might change going forward.  And then, there are mods.  And then there are updates.  And DLC.  And then, who knows what?  Do whatever you want.  

Another strange thing i noticed about the random map generator is that if you put habitable planets on abundant but also put number of stars and number of  planets on abundant, you actually get less habitable planets! and when i say 'less' i mean LESS, way less!

with habitable planets still set on abundant, I found putting the number of stars and number of planets one level less than abundant seems to provide much better results.

Anyone else noticed this? and why does that happen?