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!

I did not know that! Great find.

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.

Well, every race has a central starting planet. I always shoot for those as they are guaranteed to be a 10+, with 10 billion pop and usually a good economy.

I'm sure there are as many different answers to your question as there are players.

I always spend every starting credit cranking out colony ships. Generally I try to keep my territory pure, but it wouldn't bother me much if an alien took a planet like Mars. I'd just build an embassy or two on a nearby planet until it 'flips'. I would forego a higher class (12-ish) planet for a lesser (10-ish) planet if taking the 12-ish planet left me with an odd border or a logistics/defense issue. Also, depending on the layout of the galaxy, sometimes you can place your first six or so colonies in such a way that the aliens can't reach far enough to get past you. Then you can back-fill at a more leisurely pace.

You have to trade tech, at least until mid-game. Beyond that, you'll find that giving tech to your allies free of charge in late game, to improve relations or just to help them get an edge on a common enemy will be to your advantage. Most likely, if you survive to mid-game you'll be one of the top tech-civs anyway.

Planets. I always specialize. Earth is always a manufacturing zone. A higher-class planet becomes the economic capital. I use Mars and the cruddy planets stricly for research. One moderate world will become the research center. Later on, after I capture a planet just beyond my 'borders' I'll make that a cultural center, but before that time I don't waste space on embassies and such. I use starbases for influence if I need it.

I start by building three factories on any decent sized world. When the planet is full, if it is not a manufacturing world I'll upgrade all but one to the planet's specialty. Keep one factory because you will need to upgrade facilitties frequently.

An area with two or more good planets in the same vacinity is a gem. Economic starbases will crank production on all three worlds. I've found in this game that starbases are a true key to victory, and now that they can sort of defend themselves it's not so cost prohibitive to build them.

Population does 3 things for you (or to you):

1st: Its your tax-base. More peeps = more taxes.
2nd The peeps are your partisan defense force, and they suck! If you have a planet with only 5000 M colonists it can be overrun by a transport full of teenaged Torians with ganga-rockets. If you want to defend your planet you need to get population up to at least 10,000 M.
3rd Pop makes your morale (approval) decline. Build happy centers (multimedia, entertainment, stadiums) Or (cringe) lower taxes.

I don't worry much about where my trade routes go. I DO try to start them all at my economic capital (or where it will be) and have them generally all head through the same sectors at their start. That way if I need money I can build some economic starbases and add the trade route modules. Freighters are cheap, and if I lose a few due to war, or loss of a trading partner I just build more. The main thing is IF you are a militant, don't build your fleet up to the point where you depend on trade to pay maintenance. Militants lose friends like wild, and you'll soon find that you can't afford your fleets.

Good Luck!

I have won every game I play using this strategy, my latest game was a large map with all 9 civs on intelligent.

I play as the drath legion without customization for the following reasons.

First they start with impulse engines and industrial theory, so you get impulse engines and factories right off the bat.

Second they are a good civilization, so you can use all the evil planet bonuses and become neutral without spending any money.

Lastly their raacial abilities are well rounded and numerous.

Usually what I do is crank research to 100% for the first four turns and research hyperdrive. This gives you the ability to make colony ships with 7 movement points (2 hyperdrives at 2 movement points, 1 impulse drive at 1, a base movement of 1, and 1 extra global bonus movement from hyperdrive technology) . As the AI colony ships will only have 2 movement points, having colony ships with almost 8 times the movement speed pretty much nets you every planet that is anywhere close to your home planet. The only thing you have to worry about is the range of your colony ships, however I play with abundant planets so I can simply hop my way across the galaxy colonizing as I go to increase the range of my ships. I ususally send the first colony ship at a star system a medium amount away from my home colony to serve as my jump off point for the rest of my colonization.

While researching hyperdrive I buy 3 factories on my home planet, unless It has manufactoring bonuses, which my increase or decrease the amount I buy. I buy enough so that I create colony ships in two turns, if I have a lot of bonuses to manufacturing you can sometimes buy them in 1 turn, although you have to generate 119 shields per turn, so it is not always fesiable. After hyperdrive is done I crank military production to 100 and crank out colony ships. I usually buy starports on my new planets and set them to building more colony ships, and purchase more factories if the planets have manufactoring bonuses on them.

After that, it is basically a cakewalk for the rest of the game, I can usuaslly colonize around 20 planets in a large game, with the best ai getting around 10.

I keep my approval around 70 for the entirety of the game, so tax rate is based off of that. After I colonize the planets, I do 20/30/50 sliders for military, social, and research until I get all the resources I need, then 10-15/20-30/50-70 depending on what I am doing for the rest of the game. I usually research trade early on and get that going quickly, as you are probably going to be running a decifiet until your population gets higher. I then usually trade my trade tech to all the other civs for their techs, so you quickly get on par after your colonization spree.

I then see what weapon techs the AI is researching, most of them will probably be researching one or two, I then research the one they are not. I research the given tech until I get to the second weapon upgrade, the one that gives you 2 attack for mass drivers and lasers, and 3 attack for missles. I also research medium hulls at this time. Once I have done that I create a ship which is fully loaded with these new weapons, and have all of my manufacturing planets make those. These ships are far and away better than what the AI is making at this time in the game, I have lept to the top of the military ranking building only a handful of these ships. Doing this stops the militaristic civs from declaring war on your all the time.

From here you can win however you want, I have gotten everything but an alliance victory using this strategy, and that is the next thing I will do.

I have not tested this on the difficulties where the AI starts to cheat in its production capacity, the 4 turn lag you begin with might start to hurt more when that happens, but I still think the movement advantage will outweigh it in the long run.

As I said above, I play as neutral, the increased trade and free terraforming are too good to pass up, and once the neutrality research centers are put in the game it will get even better.

The only thing that can really hurt you is if your starting position is surrounded by ai's with no room to expand, although even then you can probably leap frog one of the ai's and still do alright.

Hope this gives you guys some food for thought, it actually has made the game somewhat boring as after the expansion stage the game is pretty much won.