It is possible.
As for advice, it's hard to distill useful general principles, but there are a couple.
Look for ways go make each bc go farther (designing zero-engine colony ships to buy for very close planets, for example, can save a few hundred bc).
You probably already know this, but keep approval at 100% until it becomes necessary to raise taxes (about when your treasury drops to around 500-1500bc, depending on the game).
A game can be divided up into three main parts: preparing for your first war, fighting your first war, and the rest of the game. In the first phase, your goal is to build up a defensible set of core worlds, and most of your time in a given turn is spent micromanaging social building and research. During the second, most of your time is spent micromanaging the tactics of ship movements. If you make it to the third, you'll probably win.
When balancing economic development with other priorities remember that your goal at the end of the day is to develop as rapidly as possible, and this means keeping your industrial capacity at 100% the whole game. Your economy has to be profitable before you hit -500 bc to do this. Once you've done that, your economy will then have to grow at least as fast as your spending.
During the early game, do NOT overbuild socially; this is a good strategy for lower difficulties but gets you in trouble on suicidal. Researching fancy factories or trade centers, and then building the more expensive structures, takes resources that you'll need for military techs and ships. Better structures only become important when you start running out of tiles on your planets.
My spending distribution in the early game makes sharp jumps from 100% spending on one category to 100% on another. It's never some nice compromise between the three like 50 / 30 / 20 or whatever. Not in the early game. If I need to build ships now it's 100% military; if I need to build ships in three turns it's 100% research so I can put that shiny new impulse drive on my ships when I start building them in three turns.
On the first turn, buy a research lab (not a factory) on your home planet. I will leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader
heh.
If a planet has 20 production remaining to complete a ship (or building), but 50 military (or social) production, then the difference (30) will be
wasted and (I
think) you will be
charged for it. This, unfortunately, rewards micromanagement so much that it's a big part of how I play suicidal. Resources spent on research in excess of what is required will be carried over to the next tech in the branch, unless the tech is the last in the branch, in which case it will be wasted. I spend a lot of time in the beginning of a suicidal game flipping between my domestic spending manager (tax rate/approval, military, social, and research allocation) and the "Colonies" tab to avoid as much of this excess-production waste as practical.
Don't fortify your starbases; they'll be easy prey, anyway, and the constructors you save can be used to build more starbases (or use the resources to build combat ships). Keep in mind that the AI will likely go for your starbases first, and they can be used as bait to set up a counter-attack (do everything in your power to be the attacker; this involves a lot of counting grid squares). As a general rule of thumb, a fleet attacking an identical fleet will be the victor around 70 percent of the time (this varies with the fleet stats, naturally). Be the attacker in every battle, even (especially) when the enemy is moving into your territory.
Get low espionage against your most likely enemy or enemies early. Being able to see the go-to paths of the AI allows you to game the AI in some useful ways. Is the enemy's most dangerous fleet coming at your territory, but focused on your sensor ship? Move your sensor ship so that it remains in the fleet's sensor range but outside of its move range and lead the enemy fleet away from your territory. Tying up dangerous enemy fleets with wild goose chases is a very important tactic on suicidal. They re-evaluate targets only rarely... it's a weakness that you can exploit if you carefully micromanage each movement of your ships.
Is the dangerous enemy fleet locked onto a starbase in your territory? Will that fleet take out all your starbases, one after another, when it gets there? I've found it works to
decommission the targeted starbase and move a "bait" vessel (sensor ship, cargo hull interceptor, obsolete tiny fighter, something like that) close to the fleet. By decommissioning the starbase, the target of the dangerous fleet will reset and switch to something else (from what I can tell, whatever's closest). Now that fleet can be lead away from your worlds by your bait ship and you bought yourself a few more turns.
It's possible to be down but not out. Did the first enemy assault break the back of your defense force? You need two things: cargo hulls with one laser and max engines, and the heart of a coward (discretion is the better part of valor, after all, right?). They can't take your planets if they can't get troops to them; that's where the cargo hull raiders come in. Hit the transports before they make it to their rally points (and any thus any escorts) if possible. Build combat ships and have them run (again, a lot of counting squares) until you get enough to fleet up and reclaim your system. In one game, I lost all my starbases, had a nasty enemy fleet camped in my core worlds, but was able to prevent any transports from sealing the deal and ended up winning.
Evil is hard on Suicidal if there are many opponents. Not recommended if it means you will fight many close enemies early on.
Very early, when enemy ship attack values are les than 10, the defense assist module on starbases makes 1 point of defense pay off. However, when they come with 19 attack, 0 defense ships, drop the defenses. In the early game, your ships won't have enough hitpoints, and defenses will be too expensive relative to weapons, to make it worthwhile to have anything other than engines and weapons on your ships. A result of this is that you can put off investing resources in ship defense research until after your first war. Note also that when both you and your opponent have fleets made up of these high-attack ships, it is even more important to be the attacker.
Tiny or small galaxies with one or few opponents can be useful for honing your early game and trying different things; I didn't realize the power of early aggression until I tried 1 v 1 games.
That's about all I can think of without having more information about where you're running into trouble in your games. Hopefully something in there is helpful
