The difficulty is on Talent(Normal).
I renamed the faction all Nintendo shit, and the faction is The Nintendrones.
Anyway, I'm in dead last place, because the Thinker Mod makes the AI very very very optimal. Just look over there in the minimap at what Zhakarov (white city blips) is doing.
My best current units are 4-3-1 and Probe Teams, since Miriam gets a spy bonus.

I'm at war with the Planet Cult (NorthEast of the Orange Units) and ironically, they attacked first. The Nintendrones will ignore all negotiations until vassalization is offered.

On the plus side of my primitive tech, the Thinker mod and its unofficial patch pack helps reduce the extreme impact of hitting Fusion tech first,... which I will not do... In vanilla, fusion generators double the HP pool of all your units. It's an arms race to get there still, due to improved range bonuses for aircraft.