Think i'm gonna stop following this after comments like these:

-games are only fun if you can break them, once broken game is worthless.  

-game is not fun when you have 80 worlds at any point during the game, but i refuse to play with map settings that prevent this, because that is not "epic". 

-despite the fact that i have won the game according to myself, i better keep up micromanaging every turn making each turn take 10-20 minutes even tho i don't enjoy that for some reason. 

cba to look up your metaverse/steam again but i assume you still haven't won a single game. 

That was because I was silly enough to start games on immense, not realizing that I lacked the fortitude (and how many people do?) to mindlessly play it to the end after attaining an obviously won position.  

Still, I'm going to try to finish the current huge (or maybe it was gigantic) map I'm on.  Things are going well.  Bopped the Yor.  

You can still play with a large/huge etc map; simply reduce the number of habit planets.

For me, colony managment is a huge part of the fun, just because every planet is different. In GC2 the governors did only a mediocre job (one bonustile somewhere and you had to manually correct) and with adjacency it's the same here. So you were/are better off/faster asigning a hotkey to the base improvements and I do so now as well. Filling up a planet takes 10 seconds and the rest does the upgrade chain. I find ship movement a much greater micro esp. on greater maps you need to go over all the map again and again or otherwise I'll overlook some stuff.

Costs. You can do that I am sure but I know the AI will take advantage of wars the same as we do dog piling other AI and gaining planets. When you think about it deeply though, with so many settings its hard to tell what type of game we all actually play and what causes the things we hear. Just thatthe expected play style didn't match the game that was played.

Least there are patchs making the game more balanced little by little. And making the cost of bribes far and few-er.

I'm pretty new to GC3 and although I've been playing 4X since Civ I, including the earlier GC's and their DLC, I'm one of the 80% of players that mostly muck around in Normal (or the one just above it); mostly so I can experiment and mix and match and get massive replayability.

Anyhoo, saw this thread and tried the strategy on Normal for the largest galaxy my rig could handle (Huge) with 9 opponents.  This was my 4th game by the way (and 3rd played to completion - I retired one after a couple of poor choices where I was swamped early on)

Got very boring after the initial settler rush colony rush (more so than I would have thought actually), and by the time the galaxy was completely colonised - I had around 30 planets before they started culture flipping - I just sat down and spammed research and eventually won a Research/Tech ascension victory (287 turns Zzzzz). Didn't build a single military vessel and only researched military tech in the last few turns to get enough to Ascend.

Metaverse score:  15

I think this says it all.  Of course I know the higher AI difficulty changes everything (I mostly muck around 4X on Normal, but not always), but this particular sort of scenario does - for me at least - eventually settle down to micromanagement hell.

Reminds me very much of the Infinite City Sprawl strategy on Civ II (except the resources are finite and fixed in place and you need some development on each planet et cetera but the game play was similar and I felt the same Zzzzz) .  

You might be interested to note that the very active Civ community takes a different approach to the "fix the AI it's broken!" lament, in that they look at this as a challenge, and people who want to use it compete with each other to max out their scores (check out Apoloyton or CivFantatics) .

But for me, it's back to a new game. Can I wage a war on two fronts with two totally different offense/defense strategies and still complete colony/diplomacy tech-wise?  Only time will tell.

Exactly.  That's why I stopped playing.  The rest is a chore.