What is the more streamlined path? Why can't I keep up?

[Biv]

My first run through I didn't know what I was doing. I went the whole democracy route and got stomped in no time. That was mostly just my inexperience.


My second I went the militaristic route. I was quickly surrounded on all sides and it became abundantly clear I was never going to catch up. The RNG destroyed me. Scrapped that one.


My third I've went full authoritarian/spiritual. I've been doing much better....but I just feel so dang behind everyone. And being a less than respectable empire, getting friendly neighbors is unlikely. They all seem to think I'm going to invade them, for some reason.


But here is the crux of my question. There was an empire, much like mine, right next to me. I quickly surrounded them and limited them to six systems. They still managed three inhabitable worlds in that space. No matter what I do, I can't keep up with them militarily. I've saved the game and ran several "test wars" just to see where I'm at, and he bats me aside like a bug. My last test was over 30 "years" ago and 1/3 of his fleet were cruisers....I'm just researching cruisers (station upgrade 5) right now.


I finally figured out what increases fleet size, so I know that's part of it. But am I missing something else? My empire is, easily, four times the size of his. Maybe more. How is he keeping up, let alone staying vastly ahead of me?


And did I choose the harder route by being authoritarian?

 

[Raylof]

One of the very big ways to get a jump on other nations is by doing the right traditions. You always want to finish the expansion tradition first as it will really help you expand faster. Second one you should go for is Prosperity as it makes it much easier to build your economy which will help you get a larger navy and better stuff. You probably want to get more research done to keep an edge against the AI, focus on trying to boost research as much as possible so you can get good techs for your empire.

For ethics it just really depends on how you like playing the game, authoritarian nations normally don't have a lot of friends as they are authoritarian and some nations don't like that. I normally pick Fanatic Materialist (For the increased research speed) and Xenophile (Other nations have an increased opinion of you)

You have to find ways to increase effectiveness for everything in your empire no matter how small it is.

 

[CrimsonMuD]

One thing that might not be obvious is the more planets and pops you have, the longer it takes to research stuff. Now I'm not a min maxer by any means and haven't looked up or quite figured out what type of science ratios to keep once I learned that, but keeping that in mind and starting to focus more on building science on planets has helped me tremendously in keeping up.

Using scientists to boost your research is a pretty obvious one, but one thi g that might not be is leveling up your scientists by having them assist research on planets.

Other times advanced empires just simply do have an advantage and you may not catch up for hundreds of years. Hopefully this helps!