if you used vanilla and the devnull out of the extras....Or did you apply anything else?

Just let me know ;)

Frankly, I think you ran across a race with a combination of 115% or more Maintenance Aptitude and the Merchant culture. Or possibly a straight out 120% Maintenance Aptitude. The standard maintenance cost is 25% of the build cost. But each point in Maintenance Aptitude means a 1% reduction in maintenance cost, up to a hard coded minimum of 5% build cost. This means that for 1500 points (115 Maintenance Aptitude + Merchant culture) or 2500 points (120 Maintenance Aptitude + some other culture), you can reduce the maintenance cost to 5% of the build cost.

If one of the AI empires is set to do this, and with 5000 points there's plenty of points to do it, and you didn't, then they pay 5% for maintenance while you pay 25% for maintenance. Stretch it out 28 game years and the disparity becomes huge.

If you want to verify this, simply take over the AI empire temporarily by switching it from computer control to player control.

In the window where you Load and Save your games, there is an option called Players. This has the list of all the empires and a button right next to each empires signifying whether they're computer controlled or not.

In a single player, you should be player 1 and the only empire without a green button.

Uncheck all the empires. This turns all the empires into player controlled empires. Don't bother giving out orders, just hit next turn. The game will then let you give orders to the 2nd empire. Examine it. Look at their tech levels, research list, empire summary, planets, ship designs, etc. Same thing with the rest of them. This will let you see what culture and racial stats they have. I think Godlike is 120 points and Superior is 115 points. Impressive if 110 points. You can also see what their maintenance cost is and what their resource production is.

Once you've satisfied your curiousity, simply reload.

I downloaded the Memnorak race files. It doesn't seem to be a standard DevNull mod race. Did you add additional races? Kuat Drive Yards races? Anyway, at 5000 points they have 125 Construction Aptitude, 125 Repair Aptitude, and 125 Maintenance Aptitude. They also have Hardy Industrialists trait and just that.

This means their construction yards is 145% faster than standard, repair is 25% faster, and uh, maintenance is only 5% instead of 25% (should be lower, but there's a minimum limit like I mentioned before).

So if your planet + shipyard II has a capacity of 3000/turn, theirs are 4350/turn.
If you have a combination of ships with repair bays that can repair 10 components per turn, the same combination in their hand will repair 12.
If a ship design costs 10000 minerals, 2000 organics, and 4000 radioactives, the normal maintenance cost is 2500 minerals, 500 organics, and 1000 radioactives per turn. But in their hands they only have to pay 500 minerals, 100 organics, and 200 radioactives per turn.

This isn't a cheat since you can get the same thing if you spend the 5000 points the same way. But the guy designing the race deliberately avoided spreading the points around and instead dumps everything into those three attributes. The race is otherwise average. Likely he wants exactly what's happening. A race that's nothing special in the early stage but if they survive until the late game will have lots of huge ships.

Ok thanks. I also did what you said and turned off the AI for the other empires.

Their empires are huge and overlap, they all use universal colonization. Much larger than I had assumed.

I wonder if there is a mod that makes the game less about expansion, I like to control a territory and not expand until I am ready to conquer everything with a tech edge. That is what I had hoped.

Perhaps I will just have to learn to expand relentlessly at the beginning, but that would be harder to defend and prevent overlap.

Thanks guys.

You can kind of do it, BUT you have to choose the right traits ;)

And overstretching isn´t a good idea either. But what quite often helps is getting early contact and build up treaties. But be warned the AI is quite aggressive.

And no, not that I know of, this IS a 4X game ;)

By the way, specialisation is the way to go!

Don´t try to research everything! In the beginning I mostly ignore weapons, I just get missiles, as you can do hit and run

Instead I go with research, space yard and resource production only if needed. Throwing a few things like armor, point defence and similar in between....

The better your research, the faster you can get everything else.

And as I mentioned before, build some freighters to ship out your populace, they add a nice bonus on everything!!!

Also so bigger a planet, the higher the production.

In other words, you're a turtle. :)

One of the nice things about SE4 is that you can tailor it to suit your tastes. I think there are a few ways you could try to slow things down.

I like to set colonization to homeworld type only, so if you start on a rock/oxygen world, you can only colonize rock worlds. If you start on a gas giant, you can only colonize gas giants. That slows things down a lot, but of course it affects you just as much as it affects the AI. I would say it gives the human player a small advantage though, because you can come up with creative ways to deal with it. It also makes it more attractive to capture alien colonies that aren't your world type, since that's the only way to get any.

I would also suggest that 5000 race points is a lot to start with, and it makes the AI much more powerful. Try 3000, or even 2000. Yes, you won't be able to get everything you want, but you can pick and choose, specialize, and most importantly, use your choices to your advantage in ways the AI can't figure out for itself.

You also might want to try generating a quadrant map without the All Systems Connected option, or whatever it's called. Try a cluster map and you'll get large sections of the quadrant isolated from the rest until someone figures out how to create wormholes. That could give you some breathing space if you can conquer and/or ally everything in one area.

Finally, if you're really frustrated, you can save your map, open it with the editor, set the starting point for player one, and transform your home planet into a Sphereworld. I suppose some folks might consider that cheating though. ;)

What software does one use to edit the map?
I would like to set player 1 start position.