How to fend off foreign influence?

1. Building influence starbases. (Why not?)

2. Building planet improvements which increase your own influence. (embassy etc.)

3. Building planet improvements which increase loyalty. (Don't remember the way, I think they were only accessible to evil races.)

3. There is an old Drengin saying: "Slaves don't spread culture."  Understand it the way you like.

  4.  Use some of your abilities points on influence bonus in your race setup.

  5.  And choose the pacifists party.

  6.  Rush-buy cultural exchanges.

  7.  The propaganda center prevents cultural rebellion on its planet,  but it can only be built once.

Thanks for the suggestions, but in this case it was a newly colonized planet, and spending several 5-10K bcs on rush-buying stuff to keep it from flipping would have been way over the top. And building things normally simply would have taken too long as I am running all-labs.

I managed to get under 4.0 with population only: sending some transports to ferry over people didn't cost me anything, ao I only had to spend a few hundred bcs to buy a farm.

  Other races dislike influence starbase building.  Many times do I get a message from another leader saying that some race is building influence starbases to "deliberately magnify" their influence.

I wouldn't worry too much about what the AI civs say about your influence starbases.  There's a big difference between using them to bring your own planet out of revolt and deliberately positioning them around an enemy planet with all the influence modules going.

It would be very stupid of them to start a war over one influence starbase that's showing just enough reruns of Neighbours to keep your citizens happy.  Because now that war's been declared, you conquer the planets that are exerting all that influence over your planet, and the next system just to teach them a lesson, and before you know it stars are exploding, planetary debris is wooshing all across the galaxy, and to think that all you wanted in the beginning was to keep your citizens from switching sides... well they can't switch sides now because the other sides have been vaporised.

But then the AI can be a bit dense sometimes.  They honour alliances without taking a look at what firepower the enemy is packing, what sort of plan they have, what kind of backup they might have, what they have to lose if attacked.  They try to hunt down scout ships and end up being ambushed by a superior force (in fact, I keep ships hanging around waiting for them to do just that).  They'll stop their transport and send it back to friendly territory if the target planet pops up a defender, no matter how weak and how easy it would be station a fleet nearby to mop it up immediately.  When deciding to pick on the human player they never do the smart thing - let one of the other empires try first.

At the point I was asking, my military rating was 0, and that other races standing hostile. So, no, p**ing them off any further wouldn't have been a good idea. Besides, my empire spanned about 15 by 10 sectors at that time, and this colony was a new one about 4 sectors removed from the nearest other planet (not counting a similar recent 'bridge head' colony that didn't even have a starport). Just getting constructors there (if I had had any) would have taken half a year.

As I said, unfeasible. Please take me at  my word next time.

You can buy a starport and buy a cheap no-engines constructor at that starport in the same turn, if you have the credits.

Sounds to me like the real problem is overextension then. Don't colonize planets that you cannots culturally back up. A single planet "way out there" is easy pickings for cultural flip, hard to defend in combat and generally quite useless in the short and long run. Unless it's a very-high class planet. Don't bother getting it unless you're really short on planets, or see options to radically expand your influence in its neighbourhood (for example, a close minor you intend to conquer, especially the capital gives a nice boost, other uncolonized planets you're going to grab, major races planets that you are willing to take etc.)

"Saving" planets from cultural flip, is generally only an option in the mid to late game as a building may be unlocked that does it for one planet, and influence starbases become easier to construct and much more effective when upgraded. Boosting population can be a short term fix, but as the population of the surrounding planets grows, the problem may later reappear.

Sounds to me like the real problem is overextension

Guilty

But then I was only starting to learn TA, higher diff than I wwas used to, and by far the biggest map. it wasn't so much that I wanted to save that particular planet, just that I wanted to know my options, and maybe ways to prevent that kind of stuff from the start.

The funny thing is that this problem was preventing me from colonizing two other nearby planets, but when the planet was finally save and I did colonize them, the foreign influence instantly halved . If I had ignored the influence and just stuck to my original plan instead, there wouldn't have been a problem...