I don't remember diff 9 AI being this mean... :(

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I've started several games with the following configuration:

Realistic 80-planets

Difficulty 9 Golemite, Avenger
Difficulty 8 Neinzul Nester, Avenger, Hybrids, Advanced Hybrids

High ship caps

And I can't ever seem to make any headway. It took me several attempts to even live through the first wave (@10 minutes), and on that game the next wave at 45 minutes is 1000 bombers and several hundred other things.  There's MK III and Mk IV planets blocking pretty much every route.

Here's a sample of a first wave. The first group is from the Golemite, the second group is from the Nester:

194 MLRS II
233 Bomber II
276 Frigate II

~2 siege starship II, ~2 raider starship II, ~2 flagship II, ~2 Bomber Starship II

2 minutes later

282 Fighter I
246 Raptor I
2 Light Starship, 1 Siege Starship, 1 Bomber Starship

Just out of curiousity I totaled up the resource counts. The Golemite's attack group alone cost 955,400 metal and 1,013,400 crystal. I have 590 and 636 income respectively. That's with a -20% Golemite and +20% Human boost to resources. 10 minutes gets me about 350-400k resources with that rate, so counting engineers, reactor costs, etc. I'm probably outmatched 3:1 just on that wave.  It is possible, just fantastically difficult even with extreme micro.  

I found that heavy beam cannons were mandatory, as siege starships were too big of a target and didn't have enough firepower to cost effectively counter the Raid and Bomber starships.  

I also found that i needed at least 2 forcefields defending the command station & cities, but more than that was a waste; if I tried to turtle i'd just run completely out of things with guns.

But I'm curous what else I could possibly do.  It's generally not a problem of the command station getting blitzed, but mostly one of just living through the waves.  The time I beat it was mostly because the Golemite rolled a fairly gimp wave (2 MLRS groups and a Bomber group.)  My extra unit is Space Tanks, which I've been using instead of bombers because of their anti-bomber capability.  Honestly, I don't remember difficulty 9 being this radically hard way back in 3.0...

[x4000]

As a note in response to the title of this post: yes, difficulty 9 (and 10) are both harder now than they used to be.  And all of the difficulties are harder than they have been since 2009 or so, as difficulty had unintentionally fallen a bit the last while.  Just about nobody is expected to win on difficulty 9 or 10, unless they're world-class Starcraft players or similar.

[Lancefighter]

I certainly hope starcraft skills dont transform into ai war skills. . .

But really, with the latest spire plot, it was difficult for me to advance at diff 8 

[x4000]

Well, fair enough -- but you know what I mean.  Diffs 9 and 10 are for someone with preternatural skills of a level that put even "really excellent" players to shame.

[superking]

try armour boosters as starting unit, they are hyper cost effective fighters AND they make your units way tougher. a huge ball of missle turrets with a flagship in the middle for the 1.80x munition boost is also very hard to kill and have the range to hit everything in the system.

[Elukka]

I picked two random moderate 8.3's today, thinking it'd be reasonable since I had a mostly easy time against a 8/8.3 duo in my last couple (unfinished) games.
Oh how wrong I was. The first wave, ten minutes in, AI progress 10, was over 2800 ships. (many, many infiltrators, over 400 bombers plus a bunch of starships)

Was the difficulty increased in the last couple of betas? Because that wave is a hell of a lot more than what two doom AIs gave me for a first wave when I tried them just to see what would happen. I realize AI type matters a lot, but it was also more ten times as much as what the 8/8.3 duos used to throw at me in the last couple games.

I'll gladly go down to a lower difficulty, but the contrast to my previous experiences with the game was quite startling.

[x4000]

That's... excessive.  I need to put more weighting in there from AI Progress, it seems.  It was intended to be greatly increased, but not THAT much, heh.

[Elukka]

I could definitely get behind increasing the difficulty of the higher settings. It feels a bit odd to be playing at the higher end after only a bunch of games, and I don't consider myself exceptionally good at RTS in general.
Hmm. Do difficulty tweaks in patches get applied to existing saves?

[Lancefighter]

machine keeps saying he is getting similarly large waves earlygame as well on diff 8..

[TheDeadlyShoe]

You can handle them on level 8. But at 8.3 and above they're even bigger waves, at tech 2....its damn harsh.

[Fruden]

 I managed to pass the early crush at 9 (with 4.x) with lots of turrets and munitions boosters. I dont think i built a single ship besides scouts and munitions before 30-40 minutes was just packing the turrets. Ohhh actually i had built 1 siege pretty early come to think of it, and built a second as soon as i could. Taking the first planet was harsh because so much of the energy was used for homeworld defense but once i had my little spot in the universe it's turning out to be sorta reasonable.

 A really good thing to do when trying out builds is to save your game once it starts and always restart from the 0.00 save rather than a new game since almost everything stays the same and it becomes a lot easier to experiment.

 Good luck, and when you pass the beginning, i hope you discover great love for force fields and hybrids, you might meet a few!