I also suspect something's wrong. I ran some tests on ridiculous level with fog of war off, observing how the AI nations develop as I played. I played very casually and without paying too much attention but I still was ahead of most AIs. I even destroyed one of my neighbours without meeting any significant resistance. On ridiculous. And yes, I remember the beta being harder too.

I trust frogboy's AI skills alot (the main reason I preordered) and I think this is just a bug, not actually bad AI. I'm optimistic about the future.

You see I agree with you that the game feels too easy. But if it can get people with your attitude to not play the game ("Will not play untill game is fixed") then maybe that is a blessing in disguise.

I suspect the Names for the difficulty are wrong or back to front.

I found the Novice setting much harder than Normal.

Wait for the release day patch that is supposed to have AI improvements and then give it a whirl. Patch should be out in about half an hour.

Fanboys of this game crack me up.  Seriously.  GalCiv2 is one of my favorite games to this day and I love how Stardock does things, I'm a huge fan, I refer to them vs other companies all the time.  I'm not posting my impressions til I play the release version a while but all thru beta I wasn't impressed and I played the build from last night for several hours and felt like I was still in beta.

EDIT:  Just realized I was playing 1.01 last night which I think is some type of release build.  For a game that cost $50 I'd say this game is in poor shape and needs some work.  There's no other way to put it and there is no excuse for it (I don't buy the indie thing, not when you charge $50).  I think it has potential, I like some of it, but overall there are a lot of things that are broken, incomplete, or just feel wrong/unbalanced.  I also had way too many random CTDs just doing basic stuff like moving my sovereign around or loading saved games.  My PC is smoking hot and has fully up-to-date everything on it.  No new game should crash this much.

And fix the ESC behavior.  Why are Stardock games like GC and Elemental the only games in the universe that do not use normal ESC key behavior?  It's maddening.

God yes, it's so annoying pressing the ESC by instict, then when properly closing the dialog window, seeing the damn options menu popping up!
But i believe that's easy to fix, and i'm sure they will fix it .

Don't be so sure unless there's huge community outcry.  GalCiv2 had the same exact ESC key behavior and they never changed it.  It was equally annoying in that game.  Hop into planet screen to tweak something, instinctively hit ESC to get out and boom, options screen, then you're wasting time moving the mouse to close TWO windows instead of one.

Never played GalCiv (from what i hear it must be a great game), but i find it weird that not many people found that frustrating. I'm playing Tropico 3 for the past month and i got really used to its ESC key mechanism (which i find quite common sense): 

- If there is a dialog window open, ESC closes it.

- If there are no dialog windows open, ESC brings up the main menu

BTW, Tropico 3 has one of the smoothest and most intuitive user interfaces i've ever seen in a game

yeah vxvoodoo, thats how most every game i'v played outside of stardock. you can get used to anything in time, i suppose.

Game is great but many of you must know Trolls are never satisfied and want to redesign every game that comes out.

Relax, it's just feedback. We don't DEMAND a change, we just point out what we find annoying/buggy. I think that's really helpful for the devs to decide what to change and what not in future versions. It's their judgment after all

Try Anno 1404

Nope, i have them both set at the hardest difficulty and the game is way too easy. This was not the case in the beta.