Okay, thanks alot, this cleared up things quite well. So I should play on Intelligent then to get a nice challenge while not getting overwhelmed instantly?
As someone else said in a recent thread tough *is* tough (where tough difficulty is the AI set to intelligent).
It sounds like you're just starting out. My advice is not to get too hung up on difficulty level. Just start somewhere and if it's too much don't be afraid to crank it down or up as needed. You'll find where you want to start out soon enough. You should be able to keep up with the AI's colony rush.
The thing is you'll start out and the lower levels can be very easy as the AI hardly does anything but the levels are not all that "smooth". There's a couple of different points where you'll increase the difficulty by a notch and be suddenly surprised at how much more difficult the AI is. IIRC going to tough was one such level. Another is going from obscene to suicidal, that can be a huge jump.
Thanks for finding the right wiki page Mumble
Yeah I noticed that awhile ago and posted a GalCiv2 site issue about it but got no response. I guess it needs to be made a forum issue to get noticed. I think I'll escalate it up the flagpole a bit.