I'm a noob, needing some help
from
GalCiv2 Forums
I bought this game a couple of days ago, didn't get much sleep 
I was doing this mission where I gotta make this race ally with me. Ok, np, I thought, and started building my empire. I decided to go with diplomacy and influence. On one hand, I was enjoying myself, ripping off the aliens and getting tons of free moneyz! On the other, my influence efforts weren't as fruitful. I thought that building some really big fancy influence bases would increase my influence border thing. Not only it didn't, not only did it not grow, it got smaller, because the aliens I was trying to influence seem to be having no problem at all making theirs bigger. Also, they declared war because they didn't like my bases, and I lost the mission.
Any advice?

I was doing this mission where I gotta make this race ally with me. Ok, np, I thought, and started building my empire. I decided to go with diplomacy and influence. On one hand, I was enjoying myself, ripping off the aliens and getting tons of free moneyz! On the other, my influence efforts weren't as fruitful. I thought that building some really big fancy influence bases would increase my influence border thing. Not only it didn't, not only did it not grow, it got smaller, because the aliens I was trying to influence seem to be having no problem at all making theirs bigger. Also, they declared war because they didn't like my bases, and I lost the mission.
Any advice?
I had few Large and Huge ships with like 3 Warp Drives and Nano rippers, not much defence. They went were like a scalpel in the hand of a surgeon that is me!
"ah, how is our weakling friend doing?" it took me a decent amount of time, but on my third try, I managed to get a massive economy running, with almost 800 bc a week, I researched the all of the yellow techs, and much more in the areas outside armor, weapons, engines, etc. I simply drowned them with money... like 10k every time I had it, and all my techs over a certain amount of time. I still couldn't ally with em tho, so I used influence bases with like over 200% improvements, to slowly take over the entire map. Something I noticed, is that the aliens, though my friends, tried to stop me by building lots of their own bases, so that I can't build my own. Worked my way around that though