Industrial sectors and NLCs are big ones to gift that will bog them down.

I have not beat any modes past challenging, but here's my strategy. I play as the Yors, for their delicious 25% miniturization bonus. When you have the minituration techs and the hyperion shrinker, you can have small ships with a considerably large amount of space, 62.(considering they only take up 3 logistical points, you can make quite nice fleets).
My capital planet I make a industrial dominion, to mass huge ships that I so dearfully love. I max the industrial output and make my taxes as high as they will go until my overall morale is a % before red. I buy a colony ship every turn, filling them up with 100 million people each until i run out of money. Using my flag ship I explore, and I usually expand into a corner, making less boundraries to defend. Also, I expand into the boundraries of my empire and fill in the spaces afterwards. Seeing as I build one colony ship a turn it is unlikely that aliens will manage to get a planet, but sometimes they do. It dosn't really matter, I expand until I get 70 planets (On a gigantic map with all AI enabled). The only bad part of my strategy is that I am economically weak and enter a depression soon after the game begins, but soon it is fixed by the tax from the colony planets. On the colonies, I build 3 factories and one starport, I may build nothing there only building space ships with the 'buy' option so they are not open to destruction. After I have these planets to start with I concentrate on researching, making no alliances so I do not have to 'help' other civilizations. I research the xeno ethnics tech soon after I have the 70 planets so I may be neutral, receiving all the land squares on planets without researching terraforming or habitat techs. After I become neutral, I research tile improvement techs and trade good techs, buying them as soon as I receive them. In my opinion, owning all the trade goods. gives you a huge advantage over the other races. After my economy is up and running, I adjust full espionage on the other races, until it becomes Advanced. This gives me techs I have not researched, (if tech trading is on), and removes the chance of war being declared from the diplomat insulting a leader event. If I have a weak military or am lagging behind in the tech tree, I use the espionage to see if there is a weak military civ with no alliances with a powerful military civ, and declare war on him and make peace treaties over and over, giving him back his planets and repeatedly stealing them back so I receive a free tech each time. However, this is a time consuming strategy and I only use it if I am the weakest civ and tech trading is not enabled. I hope this information is useful to you and I did not spam up the thread too much.  

Unfortunately, of the 3 games I've played, I've never had more than 6 planets after the colony rush (gigantic map).

This is your biggest problem, you need to colonize better. Note that the following advice is primarily for huge or gigantic maps.

Your initial starting money is what subsidizes deficit spending for quite some time, that plus an anomaly or two can keep you going for at least a year. You have to be very careful about spending this money.

On your home planet I usually buy the first factory but that's the last building I buy for two to three years. I build my manufacturing capital and 4 factories on my home planet, less if I have a production bonus. This is usually enough production to build a colony ship every other turn, at this rate you should out colonize the AI at every level except perhaps suicidal. Eventually I'll put my econ capital on my home planet as well.

A couple of words about this. Later on in the game you'll look around and think that it would have been better to put your manu cap and econ cap somewhere else. You'd be wrong. Growth in this game is exponential. An early bonus is far more important than a much bigger later bonus. Note that I don't include my tech capital in this but that's the subject of a different discussion.

You need to be careful about pulling too much pop off your home planet with each colony ship. I usually pick 5B as the pop I don't want to go below on my home planet. I take 500 colonists every other turn until I get to 5B, then I start taking off only enough to get down to 5B. This is usually at least 300. If you pick the 70% pop growth bonus, you can take 500 colonists off every other turn forever.

The goal of any colony is to become self sufficient as soon as possible. To do this you want to start the colony with as many colonists as possible and you want to keep *all* of your colonies approval rate at 100% each and every turn. Plus I *never* buy a building on *any* colony. I schedule 3 or 4 economic building for build and let the planet build them itself. The first reason is that economic buildings (except the stock market) don't require any maintenance, the second reason is they improve the economics of the planet. By the time the planet has 4B people it runs a profit. Only then will I start building factories and research buildings on the planet.

A note about tax rate, I set it as high as I can and still keep approval on my colonies at 100%. On my home planet I like to keep it above 75%. Once a colony starts turning a profit I don't mind if it's approval drops as long as it's not less that 75%.

As you get more and more colonies you start to bleed money pretty quickly. There's a bit of adjustment that's required but if you concentrated on getting your planets profitable they should start getting there by the time you run out of money.

One thing is that you do need to break off the colony rush earlier than the AI. If you've done as I suggested you'll have a good economy but you'll be behind in production. Break off the colony rush early and start building factories on all your planets. I usually go for about 4 on each.

A note about what to research during all this. Speed is one very good thing, but I tend to go for any economic bonus or any morale bonus (morale = money) ASAP. I also try to build the morale wonders. Even just xeno ethics and going neutral with it's 10% morale bonus allows you to up your taxes 10% and your economy starts to take off. From their you have a lot more choices as to how to play.

How do you stop them from upgrading . My factories upgrade by themselves?

Hi,

I usually play on Large/Masochistic with 7 other races. YMMV elsewhere.

During the early game, I do everything I can to support a massive colony rush:

The first colony ship returns to the homeworld to grab a full load of colonists. I send that ship away from the home system, to find a good world somewhere else.

My homeworld will have factories on every square that is not a spaceport or that does not have a research bonus; I build a lab there. (I can build something else on the factory later.)

I max social production, and produce or buy a factory every turn. When social production exceeds factory cost, I shift some of it somewhere else, either to research or military. If my homeworld has squares with a research bonus, I'll build labs there *after* the factories.

At this point, I can build a colony ship every turn, with production to spare. That spare production goes to research.

I set my taxes every turn so that all my planets are barely at 100% morale, for the extra population growth, especially on my homeworld, which is spewing a colony ship every turn.

These colony ships are custom designed--stock ships suck.

Every new colony has a focus on social production. I queue one factory, possibly more factories depending on bonus tiles, research facilities on appropriate bonus tiles (possibly none), and a spaceport. By the time the spaceport is built, the colony is probably just ready to begin spamming colony ships of its own. I then spam economic buildings on my growing planets.

During this time, my research priorities are getting to Impulse Drive, getting techs that give bonuses such as Militarization and Planetary Improvements (but I hold off on going for Xeno Entertainment), and Sensors.

When I reach Sensors, I pause to spam a few survey ships with lots of engines. I might also build a few constructors.

===

Notes:

I like 50% military production for a mere 4 pts. I then max out economy, grab 10% morale. I like the industrialists too. This helps me really max out ship production early on. Half the production bonus is free, which is good for my economy.

I love the Yor, who start out with great techs and can build 5spd colony ships right out of the gate.

I tend to own 20-30% of the galaxy by the end of the first year.

I will not be able to sustain 100% morale and double pop growth forever, despite picking up yummy anomalies. As my economy is about to tank, I raise taxes.

I find that it's good to have lopsided research or production bonuses.


Anyway,

Ken

Hello,

I'm a new player myself and I got creamed a lot untill I read some of these posts, they really help a lot.
One thing that I didn't see here and that helped a lot as well is to Fiddle!

Fiddle withe the settings I mean the production and taxes settings of course.
I've noticed that setting them fixed at the start of the game will do you no good in the long run.

You should watch the grapphs occasionaly and when the enemies are doing better than yourself you should react accordingly by ajusting these settings.

Another thing I've seen the AI do is to use "short bursts" of boosts (Last game was in research but Ive seen them do it for other things like economics ass well).
I have tried this tactic as well and it works perfectly. Boosting my research faster than the others...

This might be common knowledge to you guys but if I knew this before I wouldnt get creamed so much at the start.

Well, It worked for now and I'm starting my 4th game tonight

why? what did it say?

Sigh. I don't even remember beyond that I clicked post accidentally.

Necronic,
Yes, the Domestic spending bar is in a way more important, than the individual foci for a planet. Which to all newbs, remember that you CAN focus an individual planet, it can make a HUGE difference in either production or research if ya need something done quickly in that particular locale. But my point being is that you really need to use them in conjuction, much like Purge and CaptainCutlass were alluding to earlier with the short burts the AI were showing. There are times when you are going to need to get those techs, so you up yer taxes, slide the tax bar higher, and go in and focus yer planets, individually; and there are times (let's say a war) when military production is more necc for you, same idea, just different slider and focus. The combination of the two can make for some pretty powerful production or research values when needed.

Also, remember that extra social producation goes into Military production (or vice versa) VERY handy information, means you can set your tax bar to something like 1% Military(it can NOT be 0 or nothing will be done at all) 49% Social 50% Research

Final note, and this is true for Terran starts for sure, depends for other races. But those asteroids RIGHT next door to you? FREE production basically, which is GREAT when yer an economic homeworld because each one about equals the starting factory anyhow, and Earth is only a Level 10, so chances are you weren't gonna build more than 3 or 4 factories anyhow.