Its all about the economics.

I 2nd that. Add "morale is money" to that and you have at least 50% of the game.

Size of galaxy, number of habitable planets, number of mining resources, number of opponents, difficulty level and playing style (did I leave anything out) make a tremendous difference in whether a particular strategy is successful. What works in one case will probably not work in another. I've seen many different types of strategies work. The problem is that you could write a thesis on each of them if you really got down to details. The best you're going to get out of a request like this is a handfull of tips and tricks. These can be useful in themselves, but the big difficulty is integrating them into a coherent strategy. And coherent is a big key, you can get a great idea one place and another great idea another place but when you put them together it's disaster.

In some sense it's not a matter of strategy but of focus. You need to develop all aspects of the game (production, economy, military, research) in every game you play. It's just that in what I'd call an economic strategy the economy is your prime focus, etc.

There's no real way to give some kind of cookbook method for one stratgey or another. I've seen a few around, they sound good, and I'm sure they work for the author, but as soon as you get into a game trying to follow the guidelines, you quickly realize it's far easier to say than it is to do.

Anyway, all this is really just a bunch of vague generalities so I'll try to give you at least one good tip. Growth in this game is exponential so here's the good tip.

An early mediocre benefit is far better than a great benefit later.

One example, make your home planet your manufacturing capital. Later in the game you'll look around and think that one of your colonies would have made a much better choice to be your manufacturing capital. You'd be wrong. For the first year virtually all production comes from your home planet, that boost to your early production far outweighs the later benefit of having your manufacturing capital somewhere else. Almost the same thing with your economic capital. I either make my home planet or my first colony my economic capital.

Some folks recommend that you colonize planets further away from you first then back fill closer planets later. In small to medium galaxies they're probably right, but for huge to gigantic galaxies you want get to the closest decent planet (I ignore PQ7 or less early) and get it productive as soon as possible so it can produce colonies ASAP. There are many different schools of thought but it's hard to fault spending your early research on speed up to at least Impulse Drive. The final tip is to spend 6 racial ability points and take the 70% pop growth bonus. Not because of the huge pop you want to develop, but so that your colonies grow faster and become profitable sooner. It's all about the economics.

My "fun" tactic is to ally with everyone except 1-2 of the strongest races. Then I park my ships near the planets of the strongest races, and I wait for them to announce war. When they do, my allies start fighting against them and I retract my ships back to my territory. After a while many have no defenses on their planets and my troops mop up. This is nice if you have to start in a distant corner of the galaxy and you have only 1-2 weak neighbours.

Plenty of good tips here, so I'm going to add one that I don't see tossed around very often.

If you're at war with someone, or are looking to go to war with someone, do some scouting and get your espionage up to at least high (I do this fairly early for all races anyway). The reason for this is you can sometimes find one or two planets that will break the opponent's back if you take them. Or at the very least severely hinder them.

As an example, I had the Drath declare on me in a recent game. When I went and looked at their planets I found they had a PQ 30+ planet right in the middle of their empire. It contained a manufacturing, economy, and tech capital and was fully built up...so it was a real beast of a planet. They were pumping out high tech ships very quickly to send at me. In addition, there were two other nearby planets of decent value.

So while I used my standing forces to hold off their attacks, I built up a fleet of high tech, fast moving ships and some high capacity troop transports. Then I snuck them through a couple other empires and took those three planets in the span of a couple weeks, at the same time eliminating a large collection of their ships.

And that was basically it for the war. They could still produce ships on other planets, but not nearly as fast. Not to mention that I'd cut their empire neatly in half. So yeah, select good targets and make your attacks count. You'll find you can often have a much more dramatic effect on a war by capturing a few key planets all at once.

Of course, you don't always have that luxury. But when you do, use it.

select good targets and make your attacks count. You'll find you can often have a much more dramatic effect on a war by capturing a few key planets all at once

That's a good tip. I usually sweep through my opponent capturing every little planet so that I don't have any issues with planets behind the lines that could launch ships to attack transports and reinforcements as they come to the front line. But if you're in a desperate fight that you aren't sure you're going to win this is definitely the thing to do. I'll give it a try sometime.

Cheeze.

This strategy exploits the AI, and can drastically limit the challenge the game can provide. No challenge = no fun, so many players intentionally won't do these things.

Colonize quick. It's been said many times before, but if you want to improve your game, you need to improve your first ten turns. I play on small and tiny galaxies at the tough difficulty level. Strategy can be VERY dependant on your galaxy size and how difficult your opponents make it on you.

My first turn starts like this: Research Diplomacy. Quick buy one research building on your homeworld. Start five factories building. Re-design a colony ship with max engines a colony modual and enough support to get to nearby worlds, and buy one. Send your survey ship to find anomalies. You'll need the cash. Send your colony ship to your closest star that is likely to have habitable planets. Set Spending (Industry production) to 100%. Set your sliders to 100% research. Taxation is dependant on your strategy. It's nice to have 100% morale for population growth, but on tiny galaxies I set my tax rate to where my morale is 51%.

The first few turns are critical. In larger galaxies, you want 5 factories pumping out a colony ship every other turn, so the priority is to buy those factories. In tiny galaxies you want to get 4-5 planets, so you'll be buying colony ships every turn.

I colonize quickly, keeping an eye on my tax rate. The objective here is to build up research early, get diplomacy techs and as soon as possible get Trade.

Trade techs with other civilizations for other techs, but mostly for cash. Once you've researched Trade, switch to 100% social, and scramble to get your colonies profitable.

On tiny galaxies you only get 3-5 colonies in the initial rush. I put my largest as as a research planet. Build three factories and everything but one tile to research buildings. Second largest is my heavy econ planet. Build three factories, a morale building, and then a farm. Depending on how many tiles I have free I might toss in some markets, though when I get econ center building technology I'll bump that up the queue. Same thing for my research building... once my factories are going, I'll bump technological capital up the queue. Manufacturing capitol is on my homeworld. The PQ4 world in my home system gets a factory and a morale building. Later I'll change it to a stock market. Other planets? Three factories, a morale building and a farm, then markets.

As soon as I get some factories and a manufacturing capitol on my homeworld I'll try to nab Diplomatic Translators. You want to maximize your tech trading cash.

This is a delicate time. You need to carefully adjust your industry production slider every turn to keep your colonies producing as much as possible without sliding into the -500 hole.

Trade those techs! You need the cash!

As I'm coming out of the economic crunch, I bump research to 33% or maybe 50%. I want to trade, but now I'm going for weapons. Beam weapons have the best efficiency at the low end, so that's what I want. I'll trade my enemies the weapons techs as I get them. I usually get laser II. Once I have Laser II (or Laser I if I'm feeling pressed), I design 'Cheeze I'.

'Cheeze I' is a cargo hold full of nothing but weapons. No engines, no support, just weapons. I keep the social slider taking up all the production except for my (hopefully 40%) research. I set my homeworld to focus production on military, and start building a 'Cheese I'. If I have enough cash I rush buy it.

Then the next several turns I try to get several 'Cheeze I' ships. As I make them, I move them to orbit my PQ 4 world. The objective is to get my military at least 50% higher on the stats and graphs screen than any other civilization.

Once the most important things are done (getting your planets producing, getting some starbases on resources, and getting the most powerful military), then I might research some research techs, maybe some econ techs, though I prefer to trade for those. Trade and get cash and other techs, then trade those techs to the other civilizations. I DON'T trade diplomatic or research techs. I DO trade weapons techs... because I know that I'll be quickly outproducing the AI's military.

Now it's a race up the Diplomacy tree. You want to get there as soon as possible. About the only thing I'll research for certain during this rush is advanced trade, because the AI will pay handsomely for it.

If your military slips, quickly research another laser tech, and 'upgrade all' of your 'Cheeze I' ships to your newly designed 'Cheeze II'. You have to maintain military dominance or you'll get dragged into econ-sucking wars.

Finally you max out the diplomacy tree. On your PQ 4 world in your home sector (the one you've been sending all your 'Cheeze' to...), build a Spin Control Center. Now that you have military superiority firmly defined you've got some breathing room.

Time to pick up econ buildings to get the Stock Market. Maybe a few other techs. Kick your research up a notch.

Then it's time for Neutral Alignment and Neutrality Learning Centers.

A quick research up to Plasma, and upgrading your 'Cheeze' ships is a nice bump, but once your research really starts cooking you'll want to just max out the weapons tree, building a new upgrade every time someone else's military gets close to yours. Maintain Military Dominance!

Trade techs, but don't give away diplomacy or research.

Finally, get the Federation techs, and then start on the influence techs. Once you've got a full orbit of 'Cheeze' on your PQ 4 world in your home system, switch to constructor building. Influence starbases, fully loaded to flip your enemies worlds.

I'll generally flip 50-70% of the enemies worlds to my empire, and then mop up with advanced weapons techs.

Until I start mopping up, I'll never have anything but a handful of 'Cheeze' cargo hold ships, and I'll never move them.

It's a simple strategy, and it works consistantly.

I prefer larger galaxies myself. I run a lightning colonization campaign, switching over to my own homebrewed colony ship design which is only one hyperspace engine more than the basic model. I use these first five ships to hit the first PQ12+ planets they can hit, then the first structure I have them build is a starport. From Earth, I use these ships to go out and tag new star systems, hitting only one planet each, sometimes the best, sometimes the first one I happen to see, depending on how close alien civilizations are. The first wave of colonies generate ships which I will use to back fill my empire's marginal worlds. Along the way, I have the Survey ship rolling constantly, looking for anomalies, pegging my strategy on finding at least 3000 credits worth of anomaly money to prop my empire up, as I will be running it into debt early on.

For technologies, I tend to hit as many fast techs as possible before I potentially run into debt, using the diplomacy skill advantage to trade up techs with the aliens soon after first contact. Given that I've usually got a couple dozen turns before I start bumping borders, piledriving straight to Trade tech isn't worthwhile.

I tend to build fairly balanced worlds, each colony being preset with one of each major structure, unless local bonus zones dictate otherwise. Worlds PQ13 and up will get two extra farming grids for additional population caps tagged on the end of getting the one structure for each. Worlds PQ7 and lower will likely get more focused purely on factories in preparation for making them over into warship production planets when the time comes, with one farm for a population boost in the event I need them to make transports.

As each world is colonized, the starport is always the first structure, and as soon as it goes online, I que up colony ships, and I start throwing them in every possible direction to get my empire expanded quickly.

By the time you've got about 12-15 worlds tagged, you're colonies should start generating enough income to throttle back to a more sustainable economic pace, but if your survey ship has been lucky with the anomaly money, you can keep things going at a red hot pace by throttling your spending to keep your debt per turn around 50-80. The least amount of money I've gotten from the Survey ship is 800 credits, which while that game saw me deep in debt for a bit, I was able to clench my teeth and ride it out until they started becoming profitable enough to maintain sustained economic growth.

Except for Transports and Freighters, I've never used a preset design since I played my first game through to get a chance to work with all the different chassis. I now have one clean template design for each level of chassis, which I can outfit strictly based on my current level of technology, and I can upgrade it as I see fit over the course of the game. I've never had reason to use the tiny frames ever. Even though custom ships loaded to the gills will be expensive and take a while to build, when you see them go two and three on one against enemy ships, they'll justify their expense.

By using Trade and the occassional bit of diplomatic bribery of throwing a tech or two at a bordering species, I can keep things quiet on the perimeter for a pretty good long while. Even if you have to get badmouthed, its worth the bruise to your dignity to play nice with races that are of opposite ethic to you.

There are only a few technologies I've seen that aliens won't trade up unless you give up a LOT of tech, even then its not certain. They will never give up any techs dealing with planetary invasions. I had the Yor hand over Doom Rays, but they wouldn't dare give up Planetary Invasion or Planetary Bombardment for anything, including a test offer of a couple planets.

Technology is always the key to my strategy. I don't go in with skill in morale or economics, because I can work around that with a lean, powerful fleet of ships. But tech will buy you the edge you need to keep those few ships more than a match for enemy fleets, and when the time comes, the pay off arrives when 8-12 ships thoroughly demolish a fleet rated over twice your own.