I will continue with some more arguments: In my opinion AI should not be eligible to win by prestige. It should be able to collect prestige points to counter players but not actually win with it. Why? According to game FAQ on this website, the purpose of Prestige victory is as follows:

To solve the problem of “I’m going to win eventually, but this takes too long,” we have introduced prestige victories. These victories are available by tackling big galactic achievements that aren’t usually very easy to do unless you’re already dominating the game. 

See? In my scenario, they are not going to win and it certainly does not take a long time and they are not dominating the game. The game has just started, right? From all the big tech tree, how many techs I have discovered during these 43 turns? 

So what is my main point? AI definitely cannot decide it already wins, it does not have enough data because it knows jack about my strategy (like it thinks Im weak because I have no ships, but does not know I can produce bunch of them really fast, full of the big guns). But AI decided "It is going to win" ergo "I am going to lose". But I dont need AI to decide for me I lost the game, I know the best when Im defeated. I am in charge there you know..

Thanks for reading

Prestige must be way way different based on map size. On a map with 8 sectors I owned 5 of them and still had to do several challenges before getting close. I have never felt rushed by prestige on larger maps sure the computer might be out to an early lead but I’ll catch ‘em. It feels fine on medium to larger maps with several sectors. Maybe it needs to be retuned for single sector maps.

I find it funny that someone who admits to playing against godlike opponents is complaining that some game feature is unbalanced or broken.

Of course its not fair. You shouldn't be able to beat such opponents. The only way you could keep up is if you were using exploits to make up the difference.

There's not fair....and then there is unfair:)

This is a common issue in 4x games, most AI handicaps are placed right at the beginning of the game, giving the high level AI an insane start. The human players job is to utilize superior play to ramp up and overcome that start.

The issue comes in, when the hill climbs so quickly, that the human player simply does not have the time to invoke that superior play. While the human can do optimizations that the AI is not good at, it still takes some time for the benefits of those optimizations to kick in. If the hill is too steep...then it doesn't matter how good the human is...they will eventually get steam rolled.

This has been my experience with godlike myself. When I play it, generally all of the planets around me are very quickly taken, leading to an incredible uphill battle. Now that is certainly a challenge, but its also not even the same game anymore, its a completely different experience (another example would be in Civ where the AIs snipe all the wonders, because you just simply cannot match their production in the early game).

The answer to this is a more progressive bonus system. Instead of the godlike AI getting 100% of its crazy bonuses on turn 1, maybe it gets 25% on Turn 1.....50% on Turn 20....75% on turn 40, 100% on turn 60....that kind of thing. This gives the player just a little breathing room to get their affairs in order before death comes.

What I have done to simulate that is, I start the game on one difficulty lower, and then after 30ish turns I change it to godlike. This seems to help some, the AIs start isn't nearly as crazy. Its not an elegant solution, but its a quick fix.