That's a great tip for Pearl Harbor day, General!   

"Yesterday, December 7, 2228—a date which will live in infamy—our crappy little empire was suddenly and deliberately attacked by space and ground forces of the human player!"

I agree with FC. I usually leave behind most of the class fives and a few of the others. So long as you don't have too big of a concentration behind your lines it's not a big deal.

This is especially true on the higher levels (which doesn't really apply for newbies). The AI will develop them faster than you can with it's bonuses and do so at an economic loss. About the time they become worth something you can take them from the computer.

I'll definitely second the custom ships. If you win with the pre-built ones you'll need to up the difficulty quite a bit for the AI just to stay even when you build your own.

OK, first off, don't just seek out high-quality planets. Colonise everything you come across.

That is very map dependent. I play large galaxies with occasional habital planets (9 AI), and often I am lucky to reach 4 planets before they are all gone. Cherry-picking planets is not an option.

Here's what I do- I set my taxes to 30%. My custom race usually has about an 80% morale with this to start. Any tips?

You can bump up your tax rate a bit. During early game I tend to keep my morale at 51% (for the worst planet), so you could probably bump your tax rate up another 19% or so. Occasionaly, I will nix the tax rate and capacity so I can get great population increases. Selling some techs off can give you enough of a cusion to run that for a little while.

Some more tips:

-At the beginning of the game, increase your spending to 100% so you'll be producing colony ships as fast as possible.
-Send your initial colony ship back to your homeworld and fill it up to max capacity on your first turn.
-Once you've colonised a planet, buy your first factory instead of waiting for it to build.

I'm wondering, maybe that's how they outpace my research. I trade techs, but I am typically stingy and don't do very much of that. It's hard to give a good tech up.

IMHO good diplomacy is the most useful thing to have. With good diplomacy you can screw even suicidal AIs in deals.

Remember this for tech trading: even if you can only get one tech from a civ, you can still use that tech to trade with other races for more techs. With those techs you can go back to the first civ and get some more techs etc, etc

Well hot damn, if that works on the difficulty you play on I should maybe give it a shot.

I can't believe I never thought of filling up my initial colony ship. Let's just pretend this conversation never happened.

I'm focusing on the economy already, I just need to not be a conservative miser with my initial resources.

It irks me to get rid of my trade tech like that, but I better get with the program, or at least turn tech trading off.

So, instead of making my homeworld a production center, stick with marketing in hopes of finding an suitable industrial planet later? I'll work with that.

My next game tonight I'll turn off tech trading and utilize these tips. Thanks.

It irks me to get rid of my trade tech like that, but I better get with the program, or at least turn tech trading off.

I wouldn't. You can use the tech trading system far better than the AI can. See my earlier post.

Oh, and don't forget this. 100% doubles your reproduction rate. IIRC 75% increases it by 25% and 40% halts it. So, if you want money, keep your moral just above 40. If you want reproduction, get it to either 75 or 100. by no means should you keep it at something like 90 or 60 as you're just wasting money.

Consider joining an empire as well. While all of us here will be open to helping you an empire will help increase the fun even if you don't post your games to the meta.

All right, I've played for a couple of hours using these tips and SWEET.

I'm ranked first (out of 9, gigantic map) and am just finishing up the colony rush with about a dozen planets, and that's only because I hit other civilization home worlds.

Making your home world into a Wal-Mart really makes a difference. I was just set in my ways with using it as an industrial center, then trying to make trade ships to get my economy up and running. This worked great for normal and became a bad habit.

I've used all of the other tips also and this all contributed.

Thanks, no more tips for me! Too... much... power.

Th Drath do seem to have the best starting abilities, but the one they get aren't the best for everyone's playstyle. Best thing to do is hit the reset and go back a tab and you will only see their inherent bonuses. Also if you try to stack an inherent bonus with your alloted points, you will lose the inherent bonus. So spend your points in other categories.

I like the Yors miniturization bonus as one of my favorites and they get ion drive, but it can be a hard choice depending on play style and such. Morale and economy are my most sought after bonuses, but there are a lot of different prefered choices, even among top players.

i've been having good luck with the following method, up to (and including) painful difficulty:

set taxes to 49% and spending to 100%; pop growth is managable, econ is healthy

set military/social/tech spending to 26/25/49

research the techs that give empire-wide production/morale/econ bonuses first; large+ galaxies, get sensors and build 1 or 2 more (custom) survey ships to find those big planets, resources, and 2500bc anomolies.

design a new colony ship with speed 3 ASAP; every time you get a new engine or miniturization tech, see if you can build a faster ship

start all new colonies factory > factory > starport, and buy the first factory; when your starport comes online, you'll be automatically taken to the planet to plan out production again. also, two factories are a healthy base for upgrading tiles in the future.

i never research weapons or defenses until war has been declared upon me. the only exception is the branch with +soldiering; i get all of those as soon as they are 4-5 week time investments.

i hope i didn't give too much away building well-balanced, profitable planets is a viable strategy at the lower difficulty levels.

figuring all that out and developing my own strategy was most of the fun. i'm now working the kinks out of bumbleputz's planet specialization theory. it's pretty crazy... 4 mfg starbases pumping up 4 production/tech planets and i can't get the other 12 or so $$$ planets to turn a profit at 69% taxes and 75% spending >.< time to demolish some factories i think...

If you gain an innate sense of the value of a trade item for the AI's use it can be smart to trade only some technologies all the way around, but not others. For instance, if the AI already has a better weapons tech, trade it a worse tech. But if you have a better weapons tech, withhold it. It might be a while before it develops or trades for a better one on it's own. You can also use this to cripple the AI. If you are planning on launching an assault on the AI in 5 to 10 turns, trade it planet improvement tech. The AI will likely focus on developing the soon to be yours planets instead of building warships. Of course, getting the timing right on this is the tricky part...