I just completed a game (first screen snapshot below) and I thought I would give a few observations. First, here was the setup:

1. My only opponent was the Krynn Syndicate on Godlike.
2. The settings for the game are shown in the second screen snapshot below.

My observations:

1. The Krynn Syndicate did not expand very far beyond their home sector.  This allowed me to expand uncontested until I encountered them.
2. The Krynn built large fleets which is a welcome improvement in their combat skills.
3. You need to do some work on organizing weapons in the ship builder screen:
   1. the weapons in each section are not in ascending order of effectiveness (attack / mass).
   2. the Enanced Kinetic Weapon section has beam and missile weapons in it as well as kinetic weapons.
4. It looks like you tweaked the battle logic to allow ships with missiles to stay at long range longer to be able to fire their missiles multiple times before the enemy ships without missiles can fire.  Thank you!

Here is a save file made right after winning in case you want to look around:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7kc6vfzg9id5yh9mzyz44/Win-vs-Godlike-Krynn-Under-1.60.457293.GC4Sav?dl=0&rlkey=e3qam2kozqhgda5thky965xj5