Well, first of all, I was owning the AI well before they got their carriers.  Once they did, I had upgraded and tweaked my ships with even more Durantium Drivers.  By the time the AI was really spamming CVs, I was on Huge ships, with Singularity Drivers, and they would wipe 3x HP CV fleets with plenty of fighters.

Yes, I hear CVs are OP, but that is rather late game.  And I'm sure CVs will be toned down.   I'm talking about the use of Durantium earlier on.  

I just had to quit my next challenge, on challenging level.  Same galaxy size, etc, as last game, but I was instantly surrounded by Krynn and Drengin, each with 3x the colonies and pop I had.  Didnt have the time to start mining Durantium or establish enough space for enough mines.  I guess I need to re-focus my colony spam skills for the next level.

I think one of the Devs mentioned that Mass Drivers tech have some hidden (or not well-displayed) distinctions and without them they look weak in compassion to other weapons. One of them is number of volleys per combat phase. Mass Drivers is the fastest weapons. So maybe Durantium Drivers have slow firing speed? And because of it future Mass Drivers have much more actual damage? If i got some of the game rules right "resource" weapons must be somewhere in between 2nd and 3-rd level weapons of same kind.

And, even with abundant resources it's hard to stack a lot of Durantium Drivers in one ship anyway.

Yeah the AI sucks at designing ships.  As in, it doesn't even really design any ships, it just uses the base templates (those ships that show up automatically that you just obsolete from your ship lists ).  It will however use ships you have designed for a faction, if the AI is playing that faction.  So play as the Drengin and design some ships for them, same for Altarians, Yor, Iconians, so on and so on.  Then the next time you play against those factions, you can be annoyed by them using your own ship designs against you.

Missile tech for the win, always. 

25%+50% cooldown.

25% range increase

at range 1375 I hit anything at least one combat round before anyone can get even remotely into long range at 1100.

Mass driver range is what? 800?

According to GalCiv3GlobalDefs, it's 600 range without bonuses. You can get a +50% mass driver range bonus on a ship with a 50 manufacturing, 14 mass, 1 durantium module, and a +25% mass driver range bonus on a fleet with a 185 manufacturing, 15 mass, 1 durantium module, if I'm not mistaken. I believe these will stack additively with one another, though I've never checked.

Yes; mass drivers have a firing interval of 4 while missiles have a firing interval of 8. However, this doesn't really matter much when you're talking about stacking all of the firing interval reducing components as if I'm not mistaken they stack additively; 75% off of 8 brings it down to 2, which matches the best that mass drivers can have and lacks the accuracy penalty that boosting mass drivers thusly carries. Of course, there's still the question of the cost of stacking everything (for both missile firing interval reductions, you'll pay 16 capacity, 212 manufacturing, and 1 antimatter; the mass driver firing interval reduction costs only 12 capacity and 28 manufacturing but also reduces accuracy by an additive 15%). It also ignores that missiles have a better base hit chance than the mass drivers do, at 90% rather than 80%. If projectile speed matters for hitting the target using whatever the game uses to determine hit rates, then mass drivers have an advantage there (700 projectile speed for all mass drivers versus 200 to 450 projectile speed for the various missiles).