Wow, you really have been living in the stone age when it comes to Galciv.

I really haven't played past tough, still feeling out the game if you will, however, I have yet to lose.

I am sure others have their strategies, and perhaps they are better, but I find mine works for me. It may not work for you.

I never use credit. I always buy straight out.

On my first turn, I raise my taxes to 50%, raise research and social spending to 50% which drops my Military spending to 0. Total spending goes to 100% and stays until I start to lose more than 50bc a turn, then I adjust it accordingly.

I design my new colony ship and then out right buy it.
Make sure when you design you colony ship, speed is the focus.

I go after anomalies and pray for cash.
I focus social spending on the starting planet and build 3 factories.
During this time I pump out as many colony ships as I can until my money runs out. Usually have about 400bc or so left when I quit buying colony ships. If I hit some good money with the anomalies I build more.

Once I run out of cash I drop my social spending and research sliders to 25%, slide the military to 50%, and start to build my colony ships.

I usually do not pay to much attention to my financial situation until after the colony rush. There have been a few games that I ended up in some trouble. Took a few months to get out of. Being friendly to the other races helps.

Once the colony rush is over I focus on social development and increasing my population.

Once I am in this part of the game, it starts to dictate my strategy. Each game I have played has been different, and I do reanalyze and refine my strategies while the game progresses. I like to be able to adapt to any given situation. I usually like to go for complete domination but I will stay on the cusp of all 4 ways to achieve victory until I am sure I can dominate.

This works for me. Hope it may help some.

I sorta do the opposite of Quixen.

This works for me up to Tough (haven't worked my way higher yet).

Keep sliders at 33/33/34% for balanced production/research. Buy/build factories on home planet so that I can pump out a colony ship every 3 turns. (Buy the first one on turn 2, the second on turn 5, and by then I'm set at my regular build rate). Lower taxes to keep home colony at 100% morale to get the population growth bonus to feed my colony ships whilst maintaining population stable.

After factories, focus on building econ buildings, with the occasional entertainment building to raise morale to support higher taxes.

Yes--customize the colony ship for speed, although my initial research focuses first on getting the production bonuses, and next on getting Impulse Drive.

By the middle of the colony rush I am raising taxes slowly to either 39% or 49% but still need to watch my spending, slowly going from deficit to surplus without lowering the %production slider as population grows and builds up the tax base.

Up until now, I've been playing version 1.0 of the game.

Let me guess...

You always knew you were too cheap to buy the game but now you understand that you're too much of a fraktard to play the game.

If you managed to get 1.4 legally then welcome to the forum.

It looks like I'm in need of some serious strategy modification

I agree with the reply above admiring how many *different* strategies can work with this game. I get at least as much time on the still-not-boring clock from mucking around with my strategies as I do in trying to get good enough to crank the AIs up another notch. Your "problem" is a good one if you like the game still.

If you end up buying the DA expansion, I do recommend keeping up with the updates. The Stardock folks are likely to expand the expansion more than other companies "improve" a whole new version of their games. The AI improvements in DL from 1.0 to 1.4 have been impressive.