I don't even try to keep up.

I trade techs as much as possible with as many opponents as I can during the same turn or close to the same turn. I can't match the AI, but it's not necessary.

You can trade some of your techs for something and turn right around and trade that new tech to someone else during the same turn. Some of my turns are almost completely taken up by tech trading. It's one of the very few ways you can keep your economy afloat on the higher difficulties.

It starts off painfully slow, but there's a point where the dam bursts and tech trading becomes incredibly fruitful for a turn or two. You can be dead last and suddenly rocket to the lead in most techs and BCs in a single turn.

Use that window of opportunity and it'll boost you to military dominance as well. You can trade techs for cruisers and troop transports and use those same ships to immediately defeat your opponent on the planet that they launched from. A pad and paper helps with that, so you can remember to trade for the specific ships guarding the target planet.

A little imagination and focused treachery can get you ahead in other aspects of the game as well. The main thing to remember IMO, is that you're playing against a mindless and uncreative machine. Honor has no meaning when you face off against it. It's intelligence can only equal a sophisticated set of instincts at best. Use your ability to adapt and you can't lose.

Move to a parasitical proposition.

Thoughts in thread working backwards from the goal...

You can't outtech the AI on the Suicidal (barring something like Wyndstar's AAR), so the goal becomes to pick out strategic techs that will allow you to overpower the AI in some very specific way and then steal all the techs of the AI you are overpowering (or get them in a peace treaty).

For me, this means jumping a neighboring AI very early with war, preferably before the AI is really ready. In one game, while conquering an AI with ~50 planets, I was taking a planet or two every turn. I didn't exhaust the AI tech tree before he ran out of planets and I probably gained around forty techs from planetary invasion for that war. This meant I had whatever tech I managed to develop and almost all the tech of a middling AI.

Ideally, I want easy to conquer AI planets. For DA, this means it would be nice to NOT colonize all the special requirement planets, so that I can hit these with troop transports very shortly after the AI colonizes them. Skip the entire colonization tech tree.

So this means I need to get a war machine before the AI. Therefore all techs that are not geared for this aim are unimportant and need not be researched. Focus on economic, pop growth, factories, ship enhancement techs (sensors, miniaturizations, hulls, etc.) and one military line of techs. Skip everything else (including starbase techs as you will be on the offensive). Do the military techs last as the others help feed each other and military is a drain unless you are actually using it.

Since this is a military strat, use the all factory strat as it will help you build the most ships. If evil, MCC and ASC need to be high priorities. The ASC is especially useful if you can get it before popping out your first military ship. Nothing like popping out large ships in four to five turns from a bunch of planets, while the AI is on medium ships to get you feeling like it's wartime.

There is obviously more to this. Like I always avoid getting ICs until after the first war. They simply cost too much and take too much time to build. If I wait to build the ICs, the AI might get far enough ahead of me to make that first war much more painful.

There are other ways of getting this kind of advantage. In earlier revisions of my strategy, I would sometimes simply arrange to keep trading a couple of border planets back and forth with a technically superior AI. I would purposefully leave them open to his transports with transports of my own available within a turn or two. Every time I re-invaded the same planets, I got another chance at getting some tech...And it kept his transports away from planets I cared about.

The big point though isn't to try to outtech the AI. You can't when it's getting a 300 percent (or is it 400 percent?) bonus like it does on Suicidal. A pathetic amount of research effort on it's part can outstrip you. You have to do something the AI isn't doing or does poorly, and use that as a lever to get the techs out of the AI. Even if you don't like my approach above, start really watching what the AI does. Does the AI do it poorly? Is there another way of doing it? If so, can you turn it against the AI? The biggest advantages seem to come from the most radical, out of the box approaches. The AI simply has no way of anticipating them or addressing them. For instance, the AI simply can't imagine someone wanting to have their own planet taken by the AI, so they can take it back for tech. These kinds of things are beyond it.

Interesting ideas, now to use it against all who stand in my way of complete and utter destruction

You are right in that I do know one extremely unbalancing solution, but I only found it over the last couple of games...That one I am keeping off the GC II forums with hopes the dev team plugs it (and I did send it to them)!

Really the above is the core of what I do. In re-reading it there is one other major thing I do that few others have seem to try...I stop colonizing before all the planets are claimed. On a DA gig suicidal, I'm happy with 50 planets out of 900+ on the colony rush and I simply will not go over 75 or so. It is pretty hard to say that I would rather build a factory than claim an additional planet the first time around, but for me, it works. This lets me turn to internal build up while the AI is still busy pushing out colony ships and is a key part to my getting a superior military up before the AI.

Don't think this is the only way to win though. For instance, I know Magnumaniac is a master colonizer and he pulls off stuff in his colony rush that I have never been able to come even close to matching...

BTW MK, 154K on a medium suicidal...I don't think you need my help!

Oops. Sorry, guys. Posted this on the wrong screen. Disregard.