How much does the AI cheat or am I missing something?

From Hard on up the AI cheats. Hard and Unfair is a simple Economic Increase while Cruel and Vicious have a tech and capital ship level increase.

to see real tests, put them all on aggressive. Even a hard researcher wont do much against a normal aggressor.

Hard AI does cheat, but not a whole lot. It barely makes up for all the stupid stuff it builds. I'd say chances are you're probably doing something wrong with your economy. When in doubt, build lots of trade ports, only a few culture scattered culture centers, and never get refineries.

If you researched more fleet than him you will also get a lower % of your income.

The issue wasn't that I wasn't making more credits than him. I was, exactly because I had good trade. The issue was that he got more planet income, even if I had more 3-4 times more planets and didn't lose much to underdevelopment. Getting planets (3-4 times more than him), increasing max pop and alliegiance (always had more than him) are the only ways I know to increase credits...Question is if I'm missing something.

Checking the charts, he always had more fleet max size than me.

Thanks for the info.

Fleet upkeep, it reduces your income by the percentage it shows... Move cursor over credit income, and you will see it written, it reduces income by that percentage, all, so credits, metal and crystal by the same %

Have I been doing something incredibly stupid all along? I thought refineries were a good thing. :l

Hard AIs get, I believe, 50% increased resources while unfair get a full 100% increased resources.

Yet somehow I steamroll hard AIs but against an unfair I'm forced to turtle behind starbases and mass up a gigantic armada to be able to push into his territory. It's a pretty huge gap between hard and unfair.

I'm faced with the choice to fight either the hard AIs which aren't really a challenge and thus not very amusing, or the unfair AIs which results into a several hour long clusterf*ck of holding a defensive line against an endless onslaught of ridiculous amounts of ships until I've built enough myself to finally push back, which is not very amusing either.

Am I missing something here? 

I'd like to hear more about this also. I seem to see the refineries as a big prize, and they've helped me get out of a scarce resource situation (other empire had most of the volcanic/metal planets).

Yes. Only build Refineries on planets that are connected with many planets having many resource asteroids. You can calculate what amount of connected resource asteroids you need to get higher income than from trade ports. In practice trade ports almost in every occasion give more money, and cheaper to build, and it is better to buy resources from the black market due to your extreme credit income if you have swarms of trade ports.

Yes, You need to get more efficient, against unfair AI sometimes I colonize the volcanic planet next to him and manage to defend it with raping his ass with my starbase outpost put on that volcan... Unfair isn't that hard if you know basic online rules, strategies, and can use them well. AI wastes time and resources, both can be used against him. If you are really fast, you can steal key planets that are very close to his homeworld (obviously talking about small or medium maps), and he will sacrifice everything to get that planet. Even better if you starbase his homeplanet (not just with Vasari! ) while he is expanding elsewhere and not attacking you with huge forces and no real defense is on his planet, he will literally sacrifice everything and turning the situation into a genocide of the AI ships just to get his home back.

To elaborate on Turchany's point, refineries have four huge weaknesses that make them inferior in almost every way.

A. They're more expensive and harder to research than tradeports.

B. There is a fixed limit on the number of refineries (resource asteroids can only be serviced by 3 or 4 refineries). There is no diminishing returns whatsoever on tradeports.

C. Refineries only provide good income when you have a lot of adjacent resource extractors. So unless your planet is connected to several planets with 4 extractors, it is unlikely refineries will ever be better than tradeports. Tradeports meanwhile are good on most planets (save the unusual case where building a tradeport will reduce your longest trade chain, or if a planet has a bonus that reduces trade income, but usually you don't have to worry about such things).

D. Even if you have a planet where refineries would provide more income, refinery growth only increases linearly as your empire expands. Tradeports income expands exponentially as you add more planets to your Empire's trade route (the longer the trade route, the more each trade port produces), so that eventually even on a planet perfect for refineries, tradeports will still become better with a long enough trade chain.

Thus while there are some specific circumstances where refineries maybe more profitable, these situations are so rare that for the average players its better just to always build trade ports for credits and to then use the credits on the black market.

The gap between hard and unfair has taken a huge leap in Rebellion and I speak for those who just want a 1on1 on a small map.

The hard ai is too weak if your able to use basic online rules-quickly expand towards your enemy, setup trade a trade network and one culture for early allegiance income. It usually turns into a mop up than being a challenging game.

The Unfair Ai is ok if you expand quickly towards it and cut off its means to quickly produce a large fleet and if you don't-well then facing fleets 2 or almost 3 times the size of your fleet is just another day in sins.

In diplomacy this wasn't the case and the balance was somewhat fun and challenging because a wrong move really meant you would loose a vast amount of your fleet but if you were skilled then you could always recover-which meant it was gooood but it made you lazy. 

The problem here is how to tackle this because if you lower the difficulty of an unfair then anyone who expands towards just quickly slaughters it. I say tone the income down to 85% but this could be pushing it too low

I noticed that, I was playing a Trinity unfair on my laptop at work because I had no internet so I couldn't log onto steam for Rebellion and I beat it head-on rather than having to turtle hard. It was fun, harder than hard AIs yet not the clusterf*ck of rebellion's unfairs.

At the time I thought I had gotten better but then I got home and tried to reproduce the feat against Rebellion unfairs and realized it's just not the same thing at all.

So you're saying I should expand aggressively towards the AI to get his planets at the expense of my own because making sure he doesn't get his planets is more important than getting my own planets early?