Dumb luck or design flaw...

Why are you out of money?   If you are that late in the game that he's getting Rangers and you have no money, something's wrong with your economy.   That's the first place I would look.

Normally 120 weeks would be plenty of time to just research & build fleets that could take out the Rangers fine.  Even if he did get P.I. first, just back-door him.   The Rangers can't be everywhere at once.

Sounds like a map with few planets and a new player.  No offense meant.

Understanding the economy would help you.  Have you at least bothered to change your sliders from their initial 67% funding, 33% military/33% social/33% research default settings?  If not, it's no wonder you're not getting anywhere.

I assume you're playing TA, in which the rangers are actually significantly more powerful, whereas in DA they could be beaten back by a single ship with sufficient low-level techs.

However, it is worth noting that rangers don't appear until the 5th game year now (or was it the 6th-I'm not sure if year 0 is counted or not), so you're already plenty deep into the game and should really be able to deal with it.

If you're not making money, my guess is a number of things are involved.
-You haven't raised your tax rate from the default of 33%.
-You haven't really won the colony rush as much as you might think.
-You have too many structures costing you too much maintenance.
-You've colonized too many class 3/4/5 worlds and forgotten to research soil enhancement to make them better PQ.  This is relevant because population cap is related to planet quality, so they don't have much population and therefore aren't making you much money.

I would suggest you stop spending so much effort on spies, turn funding to 100% and research to 100%, and attempt to get techs that will allow you to beat said ships.  Alternatively, just get enough engines (and engine techs) on a transport to be fast enough to get in there and take their planet from them before it's destroyed.

I always trade stuff to get these ships away from the other civ's..now its my ship muhaaaaa

That's what I do in games like that.

Buy the Damned things.

And the only time that I ever got a truly "LUCKY" Precursor Ranger, was in year zero, two turns after colonizing a PQ 1 world, and buying one of the soil enhancement buildings.

This was back in DA as well.

I want TA so bad though.

Guess you've dealt with it by now

Anyway, I was in a similar situation recently.

Only thing is, the Drengin didn't find one oft those "Lucky" rangers that have something like 30-40 attack, but instead a truely horrific machine of war with attack somewhat above 100 and similar defense, too.

Could have killed a dread-lords fleet...

As it was still early mid-game, they started wiping out every military unit of their enemies (including mine)

I have absolutely no idea what to do in that situation (short of reloading).

Must have been a mega-event-ranger...

just a note for new, and some 'veteran', players: the AI, especially on the higher diffilculties where its getting massiev miniturization bonuses, has no issues with building ships that can have attacks well into the hundreds and fleets with points in the thousands.  They don't even need to go very far up their tech tree either (about halfway on the highest difficulty levels).  So in short, unless you have the ability to counter the AI in a long/epic game, don't let them build up

The Ranger has been redesigned for TA.

It damned well better be.

Still haven't gotten the bloody game.

(CURSE, CURSE, CURSE!!!)

As far as I can tell there are two types of rangers one can find.

The easy ones with about 30 mass driver attack and armor.

In one game (TA 2.02) I got 5 of them.

And the dangerous ones with very high attack in all three types.

If an enemy gets them early this can be devastating.

Fortunately in my last game the Arceans got one when my fleets were allready strong enough to deal with it.

Alternatively I could have bought it I guess...

Has anyone else noticed that it seems to be that when YOU find a Ranger, it is the old, minor one, but when the AI finds one, it is the new, nasty one?

No, actually.

The last TA game that I played (that went that long, at least) I wound up with two epic rangers while the AIs didn't even get a minor ranger between all of them.

LOLZ

Maybe the epic rangers only appear on higher difficulty levels.

Hm, don't think so, I was playing on average difficulty

I wonder if he finished that game.

When i was new to the game i would panick when an AI opponent had Planetary Invasion and I didn't. I've since learned that the AI can be very slow in getting transports to my planets. And even when they do, they usually max at 1000 Million troops; not enough to take the planet.

In all my games I've lost more planets to flipping than invasion (propabaly like 5).

I've never had any of my planets flip culturally.

And you know what's a great band?

IRON MAIDEN!!!
RUN TO THE HILLS!!!
AWSOME SONG!!!

So far every single game I've played, if I get a ranger and attack with it the next round the AI gets one.

12 times now...

Either this is hardcoded or I should get a lottery ticket. Doubly sucks that I always lose the 'duel' .

You should definitely get a lottery ticket.  I've never noticed that in my games.

Hm, I've also lost many more planets to influence than to invasion, once one of those pesky races gets huge due to a few AI's kicking the bucket and handing over all their planets to the same AI.

Good song but absolutely horrible ridiculous video clip though :p

Touche...