From the look of the minimap I would try to ally with the other race asap. Then the 2 of you would own most of the galaxy and you two could pick off the other races one by one.

Do you have tech trading on? If so, get alliance, sell it to em and ally.

I tend to agree. Ally with them, but if an influence victory is your goal, after you form the alliance, spam their worlds with influence starbases. You can still pick the other races off, but destroy your ally through influence before all others are gone. Otherwise, you can break your alliance after you've gained enough of their worlds.

If you can't ally with them, you might want to take out some of the weaker races until you're #1. While doing that, continue to take the larger AI through influence attrition.

Personally, I'd prefer to do a quick military buildup and attack the larger foe. If you take that route, be ready to invade at least half of their worlds in one turn. That way, when you lose half of them back, you're still way ahead. Survive until you can sell peace to them for a few planets and you're on top.

Bottom line is that an influence victory is possible from your position.

EDIT: You beat me to it, KP.

If you're Terran, I'd say your best move at this point would be to attack the Arceans (Yellow). Try to set it up so you take them down to 1 planet in one turn. Don't completely destroy them or you might take a diplomacy hit. Once you've taken them down, your influence will eat up the small gray and the Altarians that would be surrounded by your territory. It might be enough to get you to #1 on its own.

If possible, just put transports around all of their planets and let them declare war. That saves you a diplomacy hit too.

If you've got any Influence resources in plausible locations, be sure you mine and defend them fully. That percentage boost really starts to count once you start up an influence win curve.

Building a few extra influence improvements on planets can also help in some systems, especially where you already control a majority of the worlds. You can always replace them with production, research, or income structures later.

Actually, only a few turns after I continued this game, the Arceans surrendered.



And now a couple dozen or so turns later, the map looks like that. Notice the point in the influence graph where my influence spiked -- I think that was due to the Arceans' surrender.



Unfortunately I have absolutely no influence resources in my territory. But I have researched up to the final Influence tech, though. I have about 6-7 fully upgraded Influence starbases along the border that each give +255 Cultural Influence.



*slaps forehead* That sounds like a really neat idea. Why didn't I ever think of that! All this time I've been either placing them on galactic achievements or super projects, or randomly. I think I'll make some spies and place them on Korx farms. They have been Hostile towards me for the past couple dozen turns, but then became Neutral. I'm not sure why; I didn't give them any presents at all.

Who has the Restaurant of Eternity?

And I assume that you have stock exchanges everywhere possible. Each gives a bonus to influence.

I would say strategically buy some planets and build them up with culture buildings, but with tech trading off that is probably too expensive, and without influence resources it's probably ineffective.

Go evil for the Mind Control Center and free starbase upgrades if you can. It really helps a lot with culture flips.