[thejeff]

The trouble with most of the "gets 8x resources" approaches to AI is that they usually wind up with an AI who's by far toughest if encountered early. 8x advantage is very hard to overcome when you haven't had time to use your strategic and tactical advantages to build production faster to offset the AI's mechanical advantage. Later, the AI will still get 8x the resources from each planet/city/province/whatever, but you'll have more of them to counter with. Starting out you've each got 1.

I haven't played GalCiv, but this seems to apply to most 4X type games. On the hard levels, if I get attacked by an AI early I get swamped, if not I win easily. I wonder if a progressively increasing multiplier for the AI would work better.