so I've got this wonderful campaign going where I destroyed the entire Sol system and rebuilt from the ground up with 200,000 pop, 2 mines, 2 factories, and a handful of ships. It's going great so far. . . but it's taken me more than 2 centuries to get a decent economy going where I can, eg, research techs, build ships, and refuel stuff. It's probably going to be at least another century before I get systems resembling a typical game start (20+ labs).
While I did not start with any NPR's enabled. . . I'm bound to run into them eventually. Will they just absolutely wipe the floor with me when I make contact with them? Given how NPR generation works per the wiki, it seems like their tech will be vastly greater than my own. Any clever ways to surmount this? by "clever" I mean something cleverer than "cheat and purchase a bunch of techs right now to catch up". . . but I'll do that if I have to.