I spoke too soon.  The Drengin have started building Carriers.  Carriers are completely and utterly broken balance wise.  Everything else gets slaughtered when the "small" (instead of tiny) infinitely replaceable assault fighters are used.  Looks like each fighter has about 200 attack total.  A single Carrier defending a shipyard just took out my strongest fleet including the T.A.S. Crusader.  Sigh.

Then Play with more factions....  if you play with 80 + factions you're not going to get 100 colonies by turn 60.  You'll be lucky with 15-20.  If you don't like managing 100's of planets then choose a smaller map.  The forum has spoken, you're refusing to listen on how to improve your game and make it more difficult.

There are a million ways to punish the ai. I can win on 1-2 planets easily. What exactly are you doing that requires 80 planets in order for you to win?

Why do you need 80+ planets to win a conquest type?

you'll eventually end up with a multitude of planets yes but you do not initially need 80+ planets in order to get the ball moving. 

In other words, imagine if I was playing with 9 HUMAN opponents and they saw me get 87 planets this quickly.

WHAT DO YOU THINK THEY'LL DO?

Civ IV did it right when it comes to managing early game expansion.  I too agree completely.  

A lot of times in Civ IV you wanted to raze the cities you conquer because otherwise your economy collapses absolutely.  

But the other point is this: I want AI that can collectively work together to take down a dominant player.  THAT would be a HUGE improvement to the game.  It means that no matter how strong you are (up to the point where you're collectively stronger than everyone else), you can still lose, and THAT makes the game fun.  

Because I like the process of feeling powerful.  But I DON'T like the tedious work that comes with it.  

That's why I play up to turn 50 where I'm pretty sure I've won the game, and then I stop.  

The AI ISN'T SMART ENOUGH to deal with a dominant human.  They don't know when to work together to take down a dominant common threat.  

I would also like to delegate responsibility to a competent AI.  But the AI isn't competent enough in empire management yet to delegate to.  

So I tested out a Civ 4-style maintenance system last night. Modded in a basic cost of 3credits for each colony hub; removed the maintenance of factories, research labs and econ buildings (in Civ 4, no building cost maintenance, only cities), and then changed LEP from -0.2 approval per colony to (-0.2 credits per colony) per colony.

This seemed to help a lot (though I may have set the stacking penalty too low). By the time I hit 20 planets, I had to stop colonizing because I was spending 140 credits per turn on colony maintenance (how much colony maintenance were you paying at 20 worlds, Marigoldran? Oh yes, I remember - zero). New colonies needed to be set at 50% econ to break even. Once i'd built up my core worlds a bit, and started showing some profit from my econ planets, I was able to start colonizing again. Now, in about turn 300 or so, I've hit 120 worlds - and setting up a new planet is costing me 27 credits per turn, so it needs to be REALLY built up before it can begin to pay for itself. About 50% of my planets are Econ worlds, and yet my budget surplus regularly sinks to zero during colony waves, forcing me to stop again. 

The effect is pretty simple - there's no hard-cap on expansion, but every new world you colonize forces you to increase the % of your total worlds which are dedicated to economy. Small empires can get away with maybe 1 in 10 bank worlds, and so have 90% of their planets doing useful things - research and industry. Bigger empires find themselves lugging around an increasing dead-weight of planets which only exist to pay the increasing maintenance burden.

This counteracts the advantages of extra build queues and extra population growth, since so many of my new planets are just pushing everything into generating cash. I need to take an extra planet just to set on cash generation if I want to add one for industry or research. Eventually, I'll reach a point where I need to set every new planet I get to cash just to support itself, at which stage there's no longer any advantage to expansion aside from denying the enemy a planet.

The current LEP system doesn't counter the bonus of gaining build queues and pop growth effectively at all, since even with the penalties from being at 0% approval, you're still getting something from the planet. You're still better off having it than not. With the modded version, that changed completely - setting up an extra planet genuinely hurts until it can be brought on-stream. Class 5 worlds need significant terraforming and building up to make them worthwhile additions to the empire, as opposed to being worth it regardless.

This is (almost) exactly the kind of soft-brake to expansion that GC3 needs.

How about trying without Thalan tech? It definitely makes life easier with quick access to the Hyperion Matrix and the Gaia Vortex, along with cheap Hives everywhere.

SORT of.  The problem with your analogy is that the "foreplay" in this case is more like bashing your head repetitively against a wall.  

Well I'm bored as well now.  

You've proven the coloniser exploit is broken.  Rather than give you a whole shipyard, it should provide a more limited production bonus, or shipyards costs should be significantly increased.   I hope they fix it and in the meantime I've just going to continue to avoid it.  And Carrier Assault Fighters.  And Diplomacy exploits.  Did I miss anything else?  Hey it's a new release it's to be expected, we just need more open minds and less defensiveness.