Is it me or does it take really long for other civs to get Large Starships.

In all my games it all goes pretty much the same. Challenging is my average skill level (although I have successfully beaten it on all other levels). However, no matter what skill level I play, the AI always takes very long to get large starships.

Everyone gets Medium about the same time, which balances out the power. I stick with medium for a few years but then research larger designs, and that's it, I've practically won the game, my military rating shoots up and no other race dares challenge me.

This happens 99% of the time. 0.5% I am wiped out before I get medium and the rest at least one race is brave enough to challenge me.

Is this a bug in the AI, or am I doing something wrong?

Edit: I should probably mention I'm on v1.2

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I cant comment on 1.2, because I've been playing the beta mostly. In a few games, I suddenly found that although I had slightly better weapon tech, almost everyone had jumped ahead of me with larger hulls. By the time I got to larger hulls they were on the biggest!

Perhaps it was the way I had things setup though. The computer started off with 3 AI's in good positions, and me stuck between 2. There were 4 AI's so I decided to take out as quickly as possible, the one stuck right in the corner, the weakest one. With a bit of luck the extra planets would see me back on course. He surrendered, and gave me the rest of his planets. Yay, or not.

Because of the effort for that war I was sure I was behind in most things. So I put all my efforts into upgrading my techs as fast as possible. It was not enough though. The AI's were set to intelligent and suddenly 2 of them launched attacks, obliterating my defences. They had battelships, I still was on medium hulls.

So maybe I suck, but I put this down to the way I set the galaxy up and the bad luck of my start position. Very few planets, few stars, every resource was important. An early war shifted attention away from research which I was never able to catch up - taking the balanced research approach.

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Try turning off tech trading and see if they all advance as quickly.
If they all get huge hulls at nearly the same time, they are probably trading the techs.

And the fastest way through the tech tree alwaya begins with NLC's, and lots of them.
A few loaded up research resources and special buildings help a lot, too.

Mighty Mongoose, Challenging really isn't, the AI is still pretty dumbed down. Try Obscene and you might find they can do some huge ships much sooner.

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Thanks, I'll try that.

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