I fire up a game in an immense galaxy with the default number of races for that size, and then everything else including difficulty is at normal level. I go with the Arceans as my race.

I'm initially happy because there are three decent 10< size planets around to colonize. Great. Building colony ships takes forever, but okay, I assume this is normal. I find some resources doubled-up next to each other that lend themselves to mining starbases. I queue up a factory and then a research station, and figure I need to repeat those iterations. Again, building seems to take way too long. When my influence expands to encompass an asteroid, I spend the 500 to mine it.

To my mind, I seem to be doing everything that you do in a 4x game. BUT, don't you know it, I start meeting races and surprise, they're all 6-10 techs ahead of me and I don't have anything they don't have. Sure enough, by the time I meet everyone, I'm firmly mired in last place in both tech and military. Only two things can really account for this:

1) I'm failing to do something very important.

2) The AI races start with significant advantages.

I'm not really asking how to min-max, I'm just asking about basic keeping-up-with-the-joneses stuff. The game doesn't strike me as that obtuse. I don't want to give up just yet, so can anyone enlighten me?