While Stardock works on balancing (a given during a beta period), I suggest trying an underpowered race like Terran Resistance and see if you can win in any way other than an early rush.

@Frogboy, @Derek and others please do not nerf the Command ships, if others consider them too powerful, they can refrain from "purchasing" them.

I need the e.g. "The Gaze" and "Hivemind" just as they are to exploit the defended Anomalies. 

Knowing your ability with AI, my wish would be to code "God Like Difficulty" so that for those this game is "too easy" would get their Fourth Point of Contact handed to them.

Thus, we that want a casual Empire Building Game like GC1-3 were could enjoy your product without having too mini-max every damn turn of every damn game because some players find the game too easy.

As I said elsewhere:

The OP and I seem to be on opposite sides of the same coin. (I'm just trying to be more measured about it.) My favored play style is defensive but opportunistic and I have not had any luck with it yet. In my current game, I only had two settle-able core worlds to go with a handful of mediocre colonies. The Torians were my neighbors and they were pretty chill but it was a matter of time before the Drengin or Krynn came over from an adjacent sector and declared war on me. The Drengin went after the Torians and the Krynn went after me. I'll see tomorrow if I can circle the wagons and mount any kind of defense but the Krynn fleet is far more powerful than anything I can muster at this stage of the game.

I hope they figure out how to balance the game more. The problem I have is that the way the game plays now, if I have the strength to attack space nests and precursor artifacts, then I might as well simply attack my neighbor and if all I'm going to do is attack my neighbor, then all of these other mechanics are irrelevant and I might as well just play MOO2.

The A.I. is actually much better than GC3 (I haven't played GC2 yet).  The A.I. in GC3 was pretty terrible.  It struggled to take any planet, and the game was completely broken when you were given 3 fighters per planet.  

GC4 A.I. can take colonies, but it really needs help taking core worlds.  It was doing good fleeting up, although this seems to have slipped again in the last couple updates.  It is still leaps and bounds from where it started in the early beta.

There is still a lot of work they need to do, but it is getting there.

Although choosing not to build them is possible the AI still will so they have the OP ship. Its the big gun syndrome they have one you need a bigger one. I did play not using them and the AI eventually uses them and you have little defence.

As mentioned nerf or remove the combat focus ones.

Commander ships should be more powerful than what shipyards can produce but at most twice, not 15 times or more ie my eg above 18attack vs a 1 attack at round 1.

Even mid game commander ships are still 5 times at least more powerful than a shipyard build but it does level out a bit.

Commander ships already have more HP so really there durability/specials is the bonus they should have not combat ability.

This is the Only thing i have discovered playing Galciv4 that i feel is broken otherwise the game is amazingly balanced, with only the AI not using transports enough and too many anomalies to discover which gets reset with techs too much.

Nice to get that response Tatiora

Interesting, I've actually found the opposite to be true, that commander ships were mostly worthless.  They might have high stats at first, but they are still only one ship (and can attack once per turn), are slow, and hit points heal very slowly.

And if you research the tech for middle or higher tier commander ships, you passed up researching the ability to simply make better ships

yeah, the thing i really like about the navigator command ships is the couple that are survey vessels, gives them lots of good, tough survey vessels. but yeah, they're not as powerful in a fleet. some of the other civ's command ships give fleet bonuses and work very well together. others are just huge with big stats.  the fact that you get them right at the start gives certain "early attack" civs a huge advantage. onyx and drath can get huge early ships, yor and mimot can produce ships very quickly right from the start. when you combine these tactics with the command ships, it makes it so that other species that aren't focusing totally on war at the start (and even ones that are, who just arn't as good early attackers) will basically have no chance once they see the giant fleet suddenly right next to their planets very early in the game.

I like that feature request. Will add it to this week's sitrep.

As for the overall thread I think I'm always on the prefering things op than under powered side.

the only thing that separates op from underpowered is which civ you are and thus which side of the battle you are on.

one man's op is another man's underpowered.

History has proven that peaceful strategies are always underpowered. The most peaceful civilizations are only able to maintain peace if they are capable of at least coming close to matching to military strength of non-peaceful civilizations.

Just the way life in general works really. The bigger fish will eat the smaller fish.

Perhaps that is sad, but it is true.

hey, if u want to bring reality into this, then we shouldn't be able to instantly pop out a ship right as we discover space travel that has access to weapons we havent researched, hull sizes we havn't learned how to build, and defenses that dont exist yet.