If you want helpful advice on transitioning from gc2 to gc3, I would recommend reading this thread.

edit: I quickly reread my suggestions on the thread, since it is many months old and there have been some important patches since:

early colonizing: Not quite as important anymore, but if you end up with half the number of worlds your ai opponents have, you should figure out way to colonize more worlds.

Economy wheel and coercion: Contrary to what was suggested in said thread, coercion now sets in as soon as you stray from 33%/33%/33% distribution of manufacturing/research/wealth. 40/40/20 is still quite good I think.

Maybe you got confused by the interface, could you give us a screenshot?

For those seeing large/huge ships early game, if you have the Mercenaries DLC enabled, make sure that those ships aren't hired mercenaries. In my games when I'm seeing this happen, more often than not it is a hired gun.

Thanks for jumping in folks.  I double checked and yes, every AI was on beginner level.  Also, it was multiple ships, 2 different ones for sure as 2 different ship groups got hit on same turn that were quite a distance apart.  They could have had more, I gave up at that point as there was no way I was going to be able to overcome that. I don't think they were mercenaries since it was 2 ships with the exact same stats. 

I'm running the game with all the DLC that was available at the moment.  No special mods or additions at this point.

Thanks for the thread link, I'll take a look at it.  Thought I would be able to just figure it out by muddling through a few games on super easy mode but I guess not.  I was severely shocked by that.  Maybe it was just a fluke.  Right now I'm quite confused by the tech trees and how to best build a planet.  I'm curious how important everything is and how important is it to specialize a planet for say all research since you get bonuses for planting same buildings next to each other.

It sounds like you had a one-off situation. I'd fire up a new game.

It's good to be diplomatic in your race traits and also to build embassies and diplomatic modules on starbases, as well as researching diplo techs. That usually keeps all potential enemies except maybe the Drengin or other baddies at bay.

Cheers,

Capt. Beefheart

I was on the tutorial so I fired up an actual game, playing as Terrans.  Still on beginner but I haven't seen any of those massive ships.  Right now I'm trying to figure out how to get research going because techs are taking insanely long.  Like I went the missile route and Harpoon is only the 2nd missile and it's like 43 weeks to research.  I'm not sure how much I need to be putting on planets or if I should just be dedicating whole planets to nothing but research, econ, pop, and production.  I'm several hundred turns into the game and only producing around 350 research and my econ isn't very strong either, only a little over 100 per turn profit.  With info tech invasion costing 1000 it's hard to keep much money.

Also, don't think too much about upgrading factories etc. Building a new basic factory is a lot more beneficial, especially if it has adjacency to a present one or your colony/civilization capital.

Don't overinvest in wealth. Rush buying stuff is way less efficient than just producing it. I usually don't build wealth worlds at all and cover my expenses through trade and tourism.

What would be interesting to see is in what order you researched stuff early in the game and what you used your starting money on.