The AI plays by the same rules you do, they may get extra bonus's as the difficulty goes up (cheat) but, they play by the same rules.

What map type are you playing, as abundant planets should have allowed you to get 2 ideology picks after colonizing 3 planets?  Abundant I agree could be more as it appears greatly reduced from Gal Civ II, however, nothing in the scale you're describing.

I don't see this as an issue, you can build a shipyard or not, I normally choose to focus on building a few manufacturing buildings on a planet I'm building a shipyard on then build the shipyard goes a lot faster.

You expect a carrier to be an all powerful ship that can't be destroyed and can take out everything?  It has to be balanced...

You had to wait in Gal Civ II as well, one would get annoyed with you if you were constantly bugging them with crap.

AI will only get smarter, 

The only thing I have to say about this is, you appear extremely negative, I hope you can get past this and enjoy the game I know I do.  

Uhh, what? If the pirates played by the same rules as us, they'd be a civilization, not pirates. Barbs in Civ don't get research either, and yet they upgrade their units with the ages all the time. Pirates don't heal after combat, just like barbarians. Just show up and start raiding is what barbs/pirates are supposed to do. They're there so that you don't constantly feel safe sending unarmed ships out into no man's land. Fortunately, they're slow as hell, so you can usually just avoid them.

Did you never found a single colony!? Sorry, OP, this one's on you. You get 10 ideology points every time you found a colony, which is enough to get your second ideology point after 3 planets - you're not supposed to rely entirely on events to get your ideology... I get the feeling you weren't focusing on any one ideology and were just making decisions randomly, if you were expanding at all.

You know, even in GC2, you couldn't start building ships on a planet until it had a shipyard, and back in GC2, Shipyards cost just as much as the current ones, plus took up an entire tile on the planet below. They moved shipyards off-world to reduce micromanagement, free up planet tiles, and allow planets to pool their resources together, and it worked. I love shipyards. To wit, any planet with enough production to be a viable ship-production planet can build a shipyard in like 3 turns or less. 

Dude, wtf are you talking about? Carriers are amazing. My custom Star Destroyer is a mix of Carrier and Capital Ship, and they annihilate everything they come across. This, despite them being a MEDIUM hull, not a Large hull like most Carriers. If they didn't require 3 Durantium for their guns, I could win the game spamming nothing but. The cost isn't even that big a deal, my homeworld rams them out in 2 turns or less.

Are you using Drone Carriers? Drone Carriers are much weaker than Assault Carriers, as a trade-off for Drone Carrier modules being much smaller than Assault Carrier modules. Assault Carriers are the GOAT. They carry a self-replenishing, self-repairing, self-upgrading, logistics-ignoring squadron of Small ships that have the best of all 3 weapon and defense types. I have yet to lose a single Star Destroyer in combat across any of the games I've played. Maybe you need to increase your Miniaturization? I do contend that it did take an a**load of miniaturization for me to finally be able to fit all that into one medium hull.

I'm not exactly sure what you're complaining about here.

Dude, they still aren't even done writing the code for the average AI. To get it to the point it's at now, it took an eternity of testing and watching how the AI screwed up, then teaching it not to do that anymore. This being a GalCiv game, the AI is going to continue to evolve as time goes on, but AI doesn't invent itself. All of those games' AI that you mentioned are shooters, as well, and those games don't require nearly as much intricacy as a 4X AI. There's so much that the AI has to keep track of, and if you over-code the AI, the game slows down because they need processing power to make decisions.

Even those games you listed don't have true learning AI, they straight up cheated too, and made it look like they were learning. Writing an AI that actually learns is a pipe dream, especially when you have to write each one from scratch every time you make a new engine.

Others have already stated pretty much what I was going to.

 Turn off your pirates. They are a raiding force that lives in Starbases, more will be done with them at a later date.

IF you have played 220 turns without being on your 7th or 8th Ideology you are doing it wrong. Change your settings. I play on RARE and RARE and I usually have about 10 planets by turn 180 and I STILL have 5 or 6 ideology pics. Make your first Ideology pick the building that gives you a point per turn. Each Ideology has this building in their respective first tier.

Carriers are WAY OP, period. They are the players I WIN button.

Trade has always required the respective tech to do so, All Civ games and GC I, II.

The ai in this game is perhaps the best coded AI I have seen in 20 years of 4x gaming. Nothing and I mean NOTHING has had (at a gold launch) ever had a better AI than the one in this game.

You sound angry, I am glad you are enjoying the game enough to come here and post!

I'm sorry that you are not enjoying your experience at the moment. I would like to add my 2 cents to these subjects and perhaps expand upon or at least discuss what I know about these points. As well as add my opinion on them naturally. 

1) The pirates are not meant to be similar in any way to to races. They are an entirely different element. The barbarian comparison is a good practical reference. Pirates being pirates are prone to looting and plundering. These space pirates are out there intercepting ships and selling off the scrap. Actual game mechanic... of course not, but when games can include anything from 2 races with around 10 billion people each to 100 races over 100 billion people each, you have to assume that space faring races will have citizens traveling the galaxy, for various reasons... tourism? The pirates are out there raiding. When you personally encounter this band of rebels the will have ships that the build upon over time. getting new parts from the scrap they collect. The pirates have limitations, and I'm sure being tuned from the way they act to what they can be/do. The current pirates are a game feature that presents a problem for a player to solve by researching and producing war ships. They are basically an intro to battle. They start out small enough that they can only get your unarmed ships and thats if your unlucky. With a very limited move speed they can't really give chase to ships. You could even skip that early urge to build weapons to engage them with and go with sensors to avoid them. Or speed to zip past. Of course they will build up with time if left unchecked. The survey ship everyone starts with is more then a match for them. If you have an early pirate problem use it to hunt them down then park it near their shipyard and kill anything they try to get flying until you have the ability to remove the shipyard. I suppose in my honest opinion, I really like the pirates mechanic as it is right now. I wouldnt mind if they had a very limited diplomatic actions... ex give safe passage if paid, or hire them to attack a certain race if they can. I would suggest these be pricey and short lived. Pirates aren't the reliable bunch that johnny depp  would lead us to believe. They can also be turned off for players who prefer not to have that element in play.

2) there sounds like something was wrong with your game. That is not typical. Perhaps a ticket would help them or more details on what your settings were at was it single or multiplayer? I believe the settings they would need are things like map size, game rate, event rate... not entirely sure what else but as much as you can think of.

3) Building larger ships on planets isn't "realistic". Even if it was assumed that you built them from your planets would you not need to build a shipyard on your planet? The space shipyards I think add an element of depth to the game. It can add game play potential as well. Intel into what they are working on is visible by looking at them, as well as in the info bar. Sending ships really depends on where they are and where you need them. If you have a newly colonized planet with a shipyard, your production is still going to be low. Meaning it wont be able to just start springing ships out quickly anyways. Other then early game, I tend to send mine with a warship to defend it if I feel there is any threat.

4) I can't say much about them as I have not been known to use them often. I just today used them in a fight for the first time since probably beta 5. I really couldn't make a comparison. They were effective for my needs. Obviosly they shouldnt be used as a battle fleet but as a support for a fleet. They aren't built to get beat up.

5) I believe you are talking about trading to other races via the diplomacy. The other races simply don't want to talk to you all the time. It is something I think will be tweaked a bit at some point but the frequency is determined by map size and race count. To be honest them not letting me trade whenever I want changed how I trade a bit. It also helps to keep me from gaming the AI by grabbing say every colony ship they produce. As it's set I would personally prefer being able to trade with them sooner then I can but its not bothering me to much.

 6) The AI balancing for each setting was recently tweaked and admittedly the AI is scary good at higher settings. As it should be, at normal I don't think they gleam any unfair advantages. 1 step above that is at this time a whole other matter. This has been recently tweaked and I'm sure is still going to be. Its just dialing it in. The AI will respond to a players play style some at this point, certainly more with time. 

This seems like a blatant troll post to me...

Just sayin.

This is good advice, I played a map where I was only able to colonize two planets! Which made moving down the ideology tree somewhat difficult.

But that mechanism seems broken to me. If there's one obvious first choice then it's not really a choice, is it? And if a new player doesn't pick that choice (assuming, as I did, that they will have opportunities in the flow of the game to generate ideology points) then the whole thing is going to appear pointless.

It seems to me that once you unlock an ideology you should be able to build that ideology's building. Though that might be IMBA, perhaps you need to unlock the second level of the ideology. but anyways, it shouldn't be a choice. At some point you're going to run out of colonizable planets and then, if you haven't unlocked the ideology building tech, you're pretty much done with that feature.

Edit:

So pirates are broken? Then they shouldn't be in this release (or at least they shouldn't be turned on by default in the release).

In general, after wading into the EWOM mess I think this community needs to be more open-minded about criticisms like this. People are going to like the game. People are going to hate the game. But it's not in our (or Stardock's) interest to dismiss the complaints of people who should like the game out of a knee-jerk defensiveness.

Many of us have been playing this game for months (or years, if you count GC2). But there are going to be thousands of players who have never heard of GC2 before, never played a TBS like this before. In another AI thread, Brad said that most people play this game on "Beginner" difficulty!

So saying "turn off this BS feature" is not a good sign. Saying a feature works as long as you apply a non-obvious strategy is not a good sign. And dismissing angry reviews as trolls is definitely not a good sign.

I'm more looking at it from the perspective of someone playing the game for the first time. What choices are fun? What makes sense?

Ideology and Pirates are both really interesting game mechanics that can (and sometimes do) add spice to the flow of the game. But if pirates are just annoying for 50 turns and then irrelevant (or annoying throughout the whole game) then they're not working. Telling people to "turn them off" is not really addressing the problem. What other features of the game will we commonly suggest players "turn off"?

But would a new player know this? Would they say "Oh, ideology. Well clearly, instead of all these fun choices that make the game more interesting, I'll pick this 'strategic' choice which should hopefully let me make some more choices in the future."

Come to think of it, Elemental was plagued with crap "choices" like that. So I guess the only thing that should surprise me is that Stardock hasn't learned their lesson.

Probably not, but then learning and experimenting with this kind of decision is part of learning to play the game. Just because something is not immediately clear to a new player does not mean it's broken or wrong.

I respectfully disagree that GC3 has the same sort of problems that Elemental had, but respect you right to hold that opinion or any other opinion you may hold. I do agree elemental had a lot of issues mostly around them trying to add to many conflicting elements to the game that didn't gel, I don't feel that way about GC3.

drakkos137  I think we are never going to agree on most of this we are looking for different things from this game. I believe you are looking for a much simpler, smaller scale game with for examples few planets to manage. Try Moo2 or maybe ascendancy. GC3 is very much the descendant of GC2 and has more in common with that than GC1.

One thing you might try is playing on a small map with no pirates and some minors seems that would suit your style more; but in all honest GC3 just might not suit you, a pity.

Anger against injustice shows strength of character.  Anger about a video game shows the inability to control a temper tantrum.  Your posting style invalidates any points you might or might not have and brings the whole conversation down to the level of squabbling two year old children. 

The only question in my mind is if this is a clumsy failure in communication, or a deliberate choice to be antagonistic then blame the reader for what follows.

Difficulty grasping concepts is not the problem here.

Balance issues, and cheating AI, is the problem here.

Do go ahead with your condescension, however, its clearly that I'm simple, haven't planned this out well enough, or considered options.

You don't like the format of my angry rant?

Oh noes.

If there be pirates, the pirates should be using 1) the tech they can acquire, unless you care to explain why and how they are performing research themselves (pirate research labs?) 2) and should be required to spend the resources they steal to create ships.  Otherwise, it isn't realistic in the slightest.

I didn't ever say I had issues building stuff, and its amusing someone should mention ideology, as that's my favoured playstyle; "tall", benevolent, culture.

Been that way since Gal Civ 1.

So, this game is like Gal Civ 2, not Gal Civ 1, and no matter how much feedback I give, that'll always be the case?  So my $100 is worthless, because you say so?

Well, I'll just stop the feedback right now, then, on your command.

Also, ironic, "smaller", this iteration of the game feels like everyone is in your back pocket.

Space, the Final Shoebox... these are the very brief voyages of the AI, to steal all your resources, build starbases in your ZoC, colonize your planets, and then complain at you every turn about how you're bothering them.  Here's some quick tech advantages, AI!  Faster!  Faster!

I'm still chuckling at that "you can't trade every turn, the Ai doesn't like to be pestered", then the damn AI is telling me every single turn how weak I am, how much better my worlds would be with them, then its all about how my trade with them is great, and strengthening our relationship.  It won't shut up. 

"Deliberate choice to be antagonistic", as the trend is not reversing, and I've made several comments on this matter, as I've alluded to before.

Oh, I'm sure some of it could have been formatted better, presented more clearly, worded better, but I'm not getting paid to do this, I'm paying to do this.

A two-year old?  Really? 

That two-year old must type like a sum-bitch.

At the end of the day, I DON'T FIND THIS FUN.

I played the HELL out of Gal Civ I: Ultimate, and STILL find it fun, in spite of massive technical limitations, and that damn ship battle slowdown bug.

So, if I don't find this fun, maddeningly so, I'm to sit back, shut up, and let my hundred bucks fuel your enjoyment?

Thanks, but no thanks.

I'll continue to comment on stuff I see as a problem, and I'll get more vocal and more vitriolic the longer I feel its ignored.

Power overflow setting player might to zero?

Great example of "important stuff that really should have been dealt with a while back".

I'm also incredibly unfond of Sid Meier, and Civ 5, so if I see the game going that way, you can be sure I'll comment in the negative.