Been playing a little and I have been developing some strategies, but I'm not sure if they are good ones or not.
First is planet grabbing. My stragegy has been to crank up military spending to max and even buy colony ships if necessary and send them to the BEST planets first. Ths nearly always loses me mars, and other class 5-8 planets. So far this has been successful when a ENEMY opponent colonizes them, but totally messes me up when the altarians or other friendly races do it. They influence me right out of SOL! Do you go for quality, or try to fill in gaps first?
Second is tech trading. I hate doing it, but it seems like it's the only way to get technology. Do any of you guys forgo tech trading completely and do all your own development? WHen I don't trade I seem to fall WAY behind on tech, even if I have the most planets!
Next is planet development. I tried at first to specialize the planets, but that seems to get me nowhere fast. Recently I've started to built 2-4 factories FIRST on EVERY WORLD, then a farm or two if the planet is high quality, followed always by economic and influence improvements for big planets, research or industrial for medium and just industrial for small planets. How do you develop your planets and at what point in the game to you start specializing? I've also found that on building like 4-5 factories then when the planet starts to get full then replacing factories with other buildings seems to be a good strategy, but It's only been tested in one game. What do you thinK?
How do you decide which planets to give huge populations to and which to keep small? In this game research and industry have nothing to do with population so planets with all factories or research facilities don't have to have more than 5 billion people!
Finally, it is a huge effort to build trade routes in the early game. Is it worth it? When you do it early, it's hard because you may not know which planets will end up being high-pop, you may not know which of the other races you will be friendly with or attack, and you may not know how safe the routes will be. Also it takes a lot of resources to research the tech and then build the ships. Althoughh I just discovered that you can build a freighter in an industrial planet then you send it to orbit in a good economy planet, then to its destination, it will set up the link from the last orbited planet to the opponent planet. Nice touch!