Welp, I normally start with a factory or three, just to ensure that the rest of the improvements don't take forever. That strategy sounds about right, though for the really really big planets (I got a PQ-26 the other day) I like to balance it out. This one planet was both my tech AND my manufacturing capital. Probably not the best way to do it, but meh.

Economic planets want lots of people. Ergo, lots of space, and higher PQ planets... I guess.
Manufacturing planets want to be able to make a given thing as fast as possible. Medium planets stocked fully with your best factory districts work fine for this.
Research doesn't care about the size of the planet. Where an economical planet of like 5 pq can't rack up the combination of population and economy that it needs, and a manufacturing planet of that size wouldn't be able to make anything worthwhile in any useful time, a RESEARCH planet simply puts all the output in the race-wide research stock, be it 1 rp or 100. So you can safely put research stuff on tiny planets.

Now, I tend to set each planet to do all sorts of things, like I said. I'll have a lab or two even on a manufacturing planet. I'll make a starport on almost every planet, as well as a couple morale districts and maybe a farm+economy. After that, all factories or all labs unless I'm making an economy planet.

Did I mention that I'm kinda new at this? I THINK that most of what I said is still solid, though.

Also. I like having constructors. I'll set all my planets that have starports to make my latest model constructor and send them all to a single rallypoint near my borders, then start expanding my influence. This worked wonders for my Evil-aligned game as the Yor in a friggin' huge galaxy... free starbase upgrades, I believe? And as well, my standing military was so powerful it was able to just sit around looking important while I took over half the galaxy with influencer starbases alone. Nobody even peeped about it except the Iconians... who were summarily executed for their impertinence.

Funny thing is, my standing military was very small by most standards. I just had enough production in enough planets that to go from making my uberconstructers (40 movement!) to a fleet of superdreadnoughts would take far less time than actually doing serious damage to my empire. Strategic depth FTW.

A lot depends on the type of map you are playing. I prefer small games with uncommon habitable planets that I can finish in a night. I normally play the Yor. My typical build strategy is on my home planet I build queue up a couple factories, followed by one of every basic building. After that I alternate between money and labs until I run out of space on my home plant. The little PQ4 planet in the Yor system always gets a factory, starport and lab. I buy all my colony ships out right and concentrate on research in engines, communication and then weapons. Once I don't have enough money to buy colony ships I switch to social and lower my spending to something that is either 0 or +1 leftover. Each new plaent I colonize I always start the order of stuff with a starport, then a lab. If the planet is big enough I put one of every basic building on it. First planet with leftover tiles gets additional factories and the manufacturing capital. Depending on how settled the galaxy is looking at this point the next larger planet either gets one of everything and remaining tiles go to money or I alternate the remaining tiles with labs and money. If I get another planet then it gets labs on the leftover tiles. On my map setup a really good start will give me 5-6 planets and an average 3=4. Then as each planet finishes its social build I concentrate that planet on research. Depending on how militant the other races are looking I either research to laser V or plasma I and get the second miniature tech. I then build small ships with max lasers until I am rated the highest in military. Then switch over to research and research Xeno Ethics and go netural.


I know this build out won't work very well on harder levels in huge galaxies but on small it lets me win pretty often.

There are lots of strategies that work well. The most important thing is that you learn basically how the game works.

Personally I use survey ships to grab anomalies, fast colony ships to colonize, buy a starport on each planet when I colonize it. Buy factories or labs on 300% and 700%bonus tiles and a few 100% bonus tiles if I can afford it -- depends on how lucky i am with anomalies yielding BC. Keep social spending at 0% till I'm done colonizing. Set military spending to produce a colony ship every 2 turns on my homeworld, Set tax rate to keep morale at 100% on homeworld. After I'm done colonizing, I then build the equivilant of 3 basic factories on each planet -- then basic labs on any research bonus tiles -- then market centers on all the rest of the tiles ( or most of em ) except for the planet I plan to make my tech capitol -- labs for that planet. I use the production/research sliders creatively and use "focus" as much as possible too( usually to get a little research done while in the building phase ). Build a farm on the 5+ PQs when they need it.

I play gigantic map/ normal planets/ 9 opponents usually, If you play on the smaller maps, a totally different approach is probably best.

A comment on your 700% research bonus tile draining your economy -- It isn't! Your use of your research capacity might be but taking advantage of research bonus tiles is never bad unless you plan to use 100% production and just get research by using focus.

Running out of money is common, population has to get up around 2-3B or so before a planet starts becoming revenue neutral -- usually 6-7B for a good economy. There are lots of different strategies to accomplish a good economy and you have to adjust based on each game -- morale resources and economic resources can really alter the strategy. You need to adjust your tax rate frequently in the 1st 2 years -- usually looking at it every turn. There are 2 different types of settings I use with the tax rate.

1: Set tax rate low to get 100% morale on planets to get the double population bonus -- this gives low tax income but will get your population up fast so you'll be able to have a good economy faster -- good reason not to just spend all that bc.

2: Set tax rate as high as possible but keep morale at 46%+ on planets so they get normal population growth.

If you have to adjust your Spending below 100% much, your probably doing somethiing wrong -- like building too much production/research capacity.

Cann't say enough how much getting bc from exploring anomalies with survey ships can help an economy in the early game.

I have a question that is slightly off-topic, but linked to planets. Every time I start a game, my starting location is always the same planet-wise; one 10 PQ planet and one 4 PQ planet. Is this locked into the game? It just seems odd to me, considering some of the AI race starter systems seem to have much better planet quality. Could this be linked to my settings? I usually play large maps, 7-8 races (I always create my own custom race), everything usually set to common, on medium difficulty (I'm a casual player...I like the balance of medium). Am I simply missing some setting or another?