keep your military power high and they'll be nicer to you...

Quite true, and an important lesson. I only play at Painful too, but all the AIs react strongly to your military power. I try hard to have at least a military rating of 100%. Nothing is worse than to get dragged into a war very early in the game since then you lose control. Having a military gives you options, which is always a good thing.

Hydro

You know, I thought the Iconians were an evil race. But in my current game their good? They are also huge, having around a 100 or so worlds and I manage to keep them off my back. Military is my only minus in our relations and I've been as low as 60 at times with out them getting agressive. Now their going on hard times - losing worlds to I-League and me. They "attacked" me diplomatically at the UP meeting by forcing our governments to switch from Star Federation to Imperial. I was hot at first because it cost me most of my income.(I was down to around ~60bc per turn from ~2k.)I have advanced espionage in my DL game and I noticed a lot of Iconian worlds with ugly red faces on the map. Got a couple for myself, and might get a couple more with my influence. I guess it wasn't so bad after all, though, I still changed back to Star Federation after the 2 years was over. Iconians lost 6 worlds to me and 3 went independent (I-League). Things are looking much better now and I have found a good use for my Precursor Rangers. The game has given me 30 so far and I upgraded them to Transports by adding an advanced troop module. I looked into upgrading them with Zero-point armor and such but the cost per ship was 30-40k bc. Adding advanced troop modules was ~1400 bc each. I lost their Precursor bonus hit points but now I have an interesting new tool. My worlds that had maxed pop are now suppling troops for my transports. I put 7 in a fleet and invade the world with it. One is destroyed during the invasion and then I park the rest in orbit after I capture the world. I now have 6 empty Ranger Transports in orbit with regular Ranger attk/def and 6 billion pop on a 20 billion pop world. Plus I discovered something I don't understand. When I attacked, I had a fleet of 7 with 7 billion total troops. I used information tactics because the worlds moral was at 40% with 20 billion pop. The battle screen showed 3 billion remaining after winning but when I checked my ships, I had 6 billion pop???