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How do you maintain challenging games?
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Get rid of the unbalanced stuff that the computer can't or won't use.
Population booming is the worst offender. As AIs, the Hive, Believers, Morgans, and Gaians cannot pop-boom because their agenda conflicts with the required settings, and in any event the AI doesn't do anywhere near enough of the proper terraforming (hybrid forests or condensers) to have the food to exploit it.
So I junk it from the game. I do this by changing Democracy and Planned to +1 growth instead of +2 (and Green is -1 instead of -2.) Neither me nor the AI ever has enough psych at a base larger than size 4 to trigger a Golden Age, so therefore population-booms won't happen. If the game goes as far as Eudaimonic, I scrap all the Children's Creches. The adjustments to growth do put the game in better balance even without regard to pop-booms, I think.
The other huge human advantage is supply crawlers. I could just not use them, but that feels a tad too crippling, so I treat them as facilities: each base gets one. It's comparable to Recycling Tanks, with a build cost of 30 granting 4-6 resources per turn. This also means no energy park of course, which is horrendously unbalancing.
The last big human advantage is Fusion Power. If a human player is running a military campaign, we know to SPRINT straight for that and immediately use it in all units. 8-1-2*2 rovers, jets, and copters each cost a disgustingly low 30 minerals and are brutally effective. I usually play with Blind Research, which greatly reduces the human's ability to beeline here (and the other flashpoints of Ind-Auto, Eco Eng, MMI) but is hardly a complete solution.
Moving Fusion later in the game makes the problem _worse_ because the human player will more often get it before the AI. For now, I've been giving it away to all my allies as soon as I get it, and they usually lose it to my enemies pretty quickly. I plan to experiment with moving it to very early in the game (recall that in Civilization II, Fusion does usually come before you launch your Alpha Centauri ship). I also want to try giving the reactors power values of 2/3/4/5, which greatly decreases the power/cost ratio gap between Fission and Fusion. But that means you can't make a unit costing less than three rows (police, empath rover, etc) because of the reactor minimum-cost limitations.
Take out these three unfair human advantages, and the AI's production advantages come pretty close to matching the human's superior strategic planning. Play on maps with a lot of land to reduce the impact of the AI's ineptness with combined-arms tactics, and you'll get some very close, enjoyable games on Transcend difficulty.
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