I'll take a stab at these:

(1) No, manufacturing/research points don't scale with the population. The maximum amount is determined by the buildings on each planet along with any planetary bonuses (from economy starbases, etc.). These maximum values are then affected by how you are dividing up your spending between military/social production and research (those slider bars in the domestic screen).

(2) Right. I think in terms of taxes you'll see more benefit from adding more money buildings (trade centers, etc) than a huge amount of farms. But the higher population does have other advantages. First, that planet would be rediculously hard to conquer. Also, it would make a nice "transport farm" since growth rate is a percentage of the current population. Having 100 billion people on a planet basically means you could spit out tons of transports and the planet population would be growing fast enough to more than make up for loss of converting people into soldiers.

(3) I guess that's really up to you. You certainly don't want to try turing a quality 4 planet into a big population world since there is a population cap for planets of quality < 10 which is lower than what you could get with farms (I think quality 4 is around 2.5 billion). So that just leaves production and research. With a low production planet, you could just build cheap ships (tinies for defense or something). But I usually use the smaller planets for research since all of the research from your planets is pooled together towards one project (meaning every little bit helps) rather than being localized only on the planet that is creating it like production is.

(4) Can't really comment on that since I don't play gigantic maps (my computer has enough trouble with mediums unless I'm playing all the way zoomed out). But on smaller maps, culture is certainly one of the easier ways to win.

(5) Well stellar cartography shows up on the minimap in the lower right-hand corner of your screen. Before you discover it, the unexplored areas of the minimap will only show the locations of stars, not planets. After you research it, the map will also show the location of planets, but give no indication of their quality, or even if they are inhabitable. That's why you send ships over. Although, as you might expect, systems with more planets are better candidates for sending colony ships to since there's a higher chance of there being *something* you can colonize there.

(6) Actually, I'm pretty sure the square roots are rounded down to the nearest whole number, so your 3-3-3 defense would actually be 5 against everything (3+1+1). This actually means you'll have the same expected defense value as you would with a 9-0-0 ship assuming there's an equal chance of you going up against each weapon type ([3+1+1]*0.33 + [1+3+1]*0.33 + [1+1+3]*0.33 = 5 vs. [9+0+0]*0.33 + [3+0+0]*0.33 + [3+0+0]*0.33 = 5). Problem is, having three separate defense modules will take up more space on your ship, especially when you're earlier in the tech tree. This will leave you less space for weapons which will get you into some trouble in combat.

(7) Research along the manufacturing line of technologies. I don't remember specific tech names, but if you go through the research screen and click on the different production technologies, you should be able to get an idea by looking for the techs which give you new starbase modules.

Thanks PP...you answered questions from a lot of us out here~~~

Do you happen to know if influence starbases can be used to increase the influence of your own planets?

Influence is still a bit of a mystery to me. I've had games where I've tried surrounding planets with influence starbases and it still took them forever to join me or didn't join at all (an no, they weren't Yor planets). I've also had the one game I played on a larger than medium map where I somehow set up a domino effect of planets joining me without building influence starbases and few embassy buildings. That is, one planet joined me, then that gave me enough influence for another to join and so on. It got to the point where I was gaining a new planet almost every turn without doing anything. Needless to say that game ended fairly quickly.

Influence wins are more difficult the larger you go. I don't think I would ever go for an influence win on a Gigantic map. It would just take too long. You'd get into wars regardless and end up close to a military conquest before winning on influence alone. Might as well just disable all the other win types and go for the conquest. BTW, gigantic maps a are *great* for military conquest which is the most interesting and enjoyable way to win anyway. However, military conquest is *very* involved on a gigantic map (which can be good or bad depending on how you like to play). Takes a long time and you have to destroy *a lot* of enemy ships/planets, but that gets really good scores for Metaverse games.

I've been doing random everything maps just for fun recently and I got put on a gigantic map with almost no habitable planets / lack of stars / tight clusters. It played so much different because people only had a few planets colonized and we were so far apart. I think I did the military conquest just because alliance / tech would've been too easy and cultural virtually impossible (without a hundred starbases). I started off even further away from the other players so they pretty much left me alone for a very long time. Try it sometime though, it was definitely different. I'd be interested to see what the ai would do on this map if they were set to a hard difficulty.