Your only Task in the first...let´s say 50 Rounds, is colonizing other Planets. So yeah, there´s not much to do at the Start. But it doesn´t stays like that...

Propulsion and military production should be the first things researched. Expansion is first priority. Diplomacy can be put off, even indefinitely depending on what you want to do. Take it from a Drengin player Diplomacy is useless in the beginning anyway and will hurt your development researching it at the wrong time.

Which brings us to what you have picked up on, the tech tree is what is important at this time. Look through it and plan out what you want to achieve and how you are going to do it.

There is an occasional research bug in ToA where the research costs suddenly jump. I hadn't been bothered much at first since I swept in for early conquest and I have even finished Gigantic games with it but it puts a damper on branching out of the Drengin attack and rob your neighbors playstyle.

Ok, the lowest difficulty setting really offers absolutely nothing from the AI, they are all still on their initial 2 planets with nothing researched and I have colonized 10 or so and have maxed out factories, got high research buildings (invention matrix, I think) and early warp drive propulsion.

I guess now I should do weapon research and practice destroying a completely inferior civ just to get used to the game mechanics of it, then re-start on something several notches higher. I am sure I will get my ass whooped quickly and come back to these boards begging for help, lol.

Any other advice about early techs to research? Propulsion and military? Is that the consensus?

Different games have different mechanics and I leave it at that and for you to hash out the details. But a few notes, planetary improvements, for example, will have very minor effects when you only have 2 planets, same with economics, same with diplomacy, when you have nobody to talk to and then when you meet them, nothing to trade. Down the diplomacy line is the government techs which are also +econ, but with only a few planets and when you are rich in the beginning they also do not benefit massively. A benefit is a benefit but use the time you have in the beginning to seize as massive an empire as possible. As mentioned, different games have different mechanics and in GalCiv you or the AI cannot invade each others worlds until a certain expensive tech is researched, so your new colonies are literally immune. If you let the AI have them you will have to research your race's equivalent of planetary invasion and fight and scrabble over every world.

With the races I like to play I am usually able to keep up constant expansion with +50 military production as a pick right from the start of the game until there are no good planets practical to colonize. At that time I usually hit below 0bc emptying out my treasury but start making a positive return on economy. I make sure to research appropriate pop growth, morale and econ techs in time too, after the first basic military production and propulsion techs. I pick +morale and +econ in addition to +military production in race customization and manipulate the tax sliders to gain population growth bonuses from approval rating. The more people earlier the more tax money later.

I do not suggest that +50 mil or any of the other picks are necessarily the most ideal but it gives an idea of how a maximally expansionist policy can be pursued successfully even in ToA.

Then again I also do not play on Suicidal, I play on Tough, although it is long past time for me to ramp up the difficulty to Painful as I win easily. I am not so sure that cranking military expenditure up to 100% sometime during the expansion phase is a good idea, if one were determined perhaps to try and get as many colony ships out as possible. 50 / 50 with research most of the time is able to get me all the worlds I want, the best worlds, appropriate expansion oriented technologies in a timely manner and be significantly larger than the AI empires. I rush buy the homeworld a few research structures and when i'm ready to build, production. (Later the homeworld will also need a morale structure or two, and when your empire is larger you can convert the majority of buildings on the homeworld to the most appropriate type for the planet as desired.) At the time of this writing with this game version you can buy multiple structures in one turn from the colony management screen. I leave new colonies mostly empty, as they by themselves drain large amounts of money in maintenance and produce very little in return in the beginning with their low populations, including people for potential colony ships if you thought about having them build ships on their own.

I lied, it's almost never 50 / 50, I adjust the sliders often depending on the situation. Industrial capacity usage is always 100% unless I screw up.

Thats an excellent idea

I wish I had twigged that one when I started a few years ago - nice one, logged that firmly in my "useful ideas" notepad.

Regards
Zy