Hey guys, just thought I'd share with you a good way to start that I've found very effective, I didn't originally intend this post to be so long but I guess I had a lot of info I wanted to share haha

The trick to this strat is to power up your secondary planet rather than your homeworld for rushing, which frees up your homeworld and it's sweet, sweet taxpaying population of 8 mil+ to concentrate entirely on economy.

I usually use the torians for this strat because you can produce population to fuel your colony rushes quite easily, and also get up to 12m on your homeworld within the first few turns increasing the effectiveness even further.

Here's a rough guide:

* Homeworld builds nothing but adv. market centers at the start. Don't rush buy them as they build very quickly by themselves, you don't even need a factory as the civilization capital has more than enough industry to quickly build markets. (obviously if you have tiles then capitalize on them, but other than that market centres all the way). You don't even need morale buildings because of the innate. +25 morale in the civ. capital.

* Secondary planet rush-buys 4 factories + starport in the first 5 turns and then starts producing colony ships like mad (divert the asteroids to secondary world for for added production). Don't ever rush buy colony ships, it will only take 4-5 turns to build one using the slider strat below.

* As far as sliders go - for the first couple of turns focus 100% research and get adv. propultion techniques and ion drive (This way you can build 3 speed colony ships with 2 ion and 2 basic life support), then switch to 99% social and 1% military after that. After the first 5 turns your secondary world is already fully developed it will convert the social to 100% military and will produce colony ships as fast as it can, while still allowing your other planets to go max infrastructure.

* Other than those first four factories don't rush buy anything else, your 99% social spending will allow new worlds to get a factory up within 5 turns so you can save your money to soak up the anavoidable spending that goes with the early game. If you do need to research something quickly (like xeno labs) slide research up until it takes a turn to complete and then go back to max production.

* If you're playing torians, try to tweak your tax slider so that your worlds that aren't at max pop are always at 100%, this will mean that your economy runs at a loss at the start but once the initial rush is over you'll have a full population to tax. When you pick your racial abilities max morale and take populists for your party. This will enable you to still run a decent tax rate while still keeping your lower pop worlds breeding at 100%.

* Your homeworld will probably be the second world to fill up and once it's done you can start producing constructors, or more colony ships depending on what's on the map, even without factories it's still no slouch thanks to the civ capital.

* When colonising worlds, try to make the biggest ones economy worlds, the medium sized ones research worlds and smaller ones production worlds, obviously this will vary depending on tiles. Research worlds get a few factories then all xeno labs. Production worlds get all factories. And economy worlds get a farm, 2 ent. buildings and the rest in market centres, only go for more than 1 farm if it's exeptionally big (16+). Later on you'll want big production worlds to churn out capital ships but at the start it's better to have worlds all around your empire producing rather than 1 big one in one spot due to the slow speed of ships at the start of the game.

* I usually try to get 1 economy and 1 research world for every 2 production worlds early. If you're going to err. always err on the side of economy

That's all I have so far.