Things I've learnt playing Stellaris

[TranscendentalDragon]

To me its nemesis, what regularily destroys my fanatic purifiers. Especially that one devouring swarm I designed, so the AI is able to get the maximum power out of civics, traits and such.
In most games it manages to conquer 1/3 of the galaxy, sometimes even half (eating whole federations). Then it picks become the crisis and gets overwhelmed. As every tiny pleb empire attacks from all sides and the swarm has just not enough fleets to be everwhere at once...

All the large builtup to be the arch nemesis for my empire throughout this playthrough - wasted. I end up not having to lift a finger...

Maybe it's because I play with lategame scaling difficulty, but that has definitely not been my experience. By the time everyone declares crisis war of them, it's either that they've gained enough menace in my process of wiping them out, significantly bumping the difficulty of the task, or they start eating star after star, empire after empire, with regular AI unable to stop them without my or FEs' help. Speaking of, FEs are much more of an issue with crisis empires, as you're unable to occupy territory they seize in their humiliation wars in the middle of "oh, $#!+, they're blowing up the galaxy, stop them!" war.

 

[Fenris_SE]

1) Earth is the luckiest planet in the galaxy

Nearly every time I'd find Sol, they'd just nuke themselves (or already be nuked).

Not sure if dumb, or they just really don't want to meet me.

 

[CantGetNoSleep]

Nearly every time I'd find Sol, they'd just nuke themselves (or already be nuked).

Not sure if dumb, or they just really don't want to meet me.

Aside from the overwhelming evidence I quoted above, the state of current global politics also confirms the dumb theory...

 

[hart30]

Maybe it's because I play with lategame scaling difficulty, but that has definitely not been my experience. By the time everyone declares crisis war of them, it's either that they've gained enough menace in my process of wiping them out, significantly bumping the difficulty of the task, or they start eating star after star, empire after empire, with regular AI unable to stop them without my or FEs' help. Speaking of, FEs are much more of an issue with crisis empires, as you're unable to occupy territory they seize in their humiliation wars in the middle of "oh, $#!+, they're blowing up the galaxy, stop them!" war.

Yeah, maybe it is lategame scaling. But galaxy size and the amount of empires in the galaxy also play a role. I only play with the two biggest map sizes and without scaling (so the AI gets its Admiral difficulty boni right from the start).