So most planet-spanning civilisations go extinct, because the competitive patterns of behaviour which drive expansion are too dumb to scale to true planet-spanning sentience and self-awareness.
It's easy to imagine a more capable intelligence than our own due to having many more senses, maybe better memory than ourselves, better algorithms for pattern detection and prediction, but by definition you can't be more intelligent than the fundamental predictability of the world in which you are part.
I feel much of humanity's effectiveness comes from ablating the complexity of the world to make it more predictable and easier to plan around. Basically, we have certain physical capabilities that can be leveraged to "reorganize" the ecosystem in such a way that it becomes more easily exploitable. That's the main trick. But that's circumstantial and I can't help but think that it's going to revert to the mean at some point.
That's because in spite of what we might intuit, the ceiling of non-intelligence is probably higher than the ceiling of intelligence. Intelligence involves matching an intent to an effective plan to execute that intent. It's a pretty specific kind of system and therefore a pretty small section of the solution space. In some situations it's going to be very effective, but what are the odds that the most effective resource consumption machines would happen to be organized just like that?
Or at least we used to, before the c-section was invented.