Yes, good idea to look at trade screen - this gives a clearer picture.
When this screenshot was taken:
They had 95 ships to my 25.
Some of their ships were like: Assault (Medium), 170HP, 33 Beam Def., 48 Kinetic Atk. while mine were maybe 1/4 of that.
They had 20 colonies to my 9.
A lot of my nearby systems had dead planets and nothing above PQ 12.
They had a PQ 28 with an average of 15 or so.
I usually play on Tiny / Small galaxies and I was expecting the starting location to be less important in the gigantic galaxy. It appears in this case the Drengin got a lot of high quality planets near to the starting location.
I forgot to mention that it's a spiral galaxy map. The planet density looks to be greater at the galactic core. I wonder if that's a factor.
